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  • HMTK - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link

    Would be nice to see one of these against a Fusion IO drive. Those are enterprise PCIe SSD's but I wonder how they'd compare.

    You should try to get one for Johan and test it under vSphere.
  • davegraham - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link

    a more direct comparison would be with the LSI Warpdrive. TBH, OCZ still isn't ready for prime time in the enterprise regardless of who's ASIC they're using. If they want to play with the big boys, they need a solid support staff and design team in place.

    one quick quirk with this card is the full height, half-depth design + daughterboard. in a card-dense chassis (esp. 1U systems), this won't fly. An LSI WarpDrive, for contrast, is half-height, half-depth @ 300GB.

    dave
  • skrewler2 - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link

    I don't know why you think enterprise means they need 'solid support'. This may be true for some organizations, but probably does not apply to the companies that would actually be interested in seeing these benchmarks.
  • HMTK - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link

    I think as in support for (server) OS's other than Windows. These things could be nice for desktop virtualization. There you typically don't need lots of disk space but you need massive IO when people start working and stuff. Bootstorms kill VDI.
  • davegraham - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link

    This card wouldn't do a bad job at bootstorms for VDI use cases but the WarpDrive's forte is going to show up there pretty strongly. ;)
  • davegraham - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link

    OCZ is deciding to move upmarket and not just focus on consumers and SMB anymore. when that move occurs, they need to have an ecosystem that will support the inclusion of these devices in systems, not just try to price themselves into systems. OCZ also has a storied history of reliability issues that are going to impact this as well.
  • MrSpadge - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link

    Storagereview.com has it compared to the LSI Warpdrive.

    MrS
  • davegraham - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link

    interesting review with the knowledge that most of the workloads i've used the warpdrive for are shown to be it's forte...and it's still a generation behind in ASICs (SF-1200 vs SF-2xxx). I know there'll be a refresh of that part. ;)
  • parsec21 - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link


    Storage Review just did a side by side review of the Revo and Warp cards although they are intended for different markets. For a fraction of the price the OCZ Revo outclassed or matched the LSI Warp in most real world benchmarks. The only areas where the Warp led were due to it having HW RAID with six SF1200 processors tied to SLC memory along with a $8000-$10000 price tag.

    The results show that the design team at OCZ utlizing a custom virtual controller and async MLC memory created a product that offers a great deal of performance for a pretty good price.

    storagereview.com/ocz_revodrive_3_x2_480gb_review
  • skrewler2 - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link

    I was about to include that in my post but saw you beat me to it. Would definitely be interested in that as well.
  • GullLars - Thursday, June 30, 2011 - link

    This card will get decimated by even an 80GB ioDrive, not to mention the 320GB ioDrive Duo, in just about any real world scenario. They are designed from completely different standpoints.

    While both are highly parallell, the ioDrive is highly optimized for latency and can push close to 20.000 4KB random read IOPS (~75-80MB/s) at a QD of 1, while Revodrive 3 x2 reaches 13K at QD 3, and around 4-5K at QD 1.
    The ioDrive also handles mixed IO well, and scales really fast at low block sizes and queue depths, so you would need incredibly heavy parallell workloads to keep it at a notable QD (>10).

    What bothers me the most with the Revodrive 3 x2 is that it doesn't implement an onboard cache at all. With 64-512MB you could use it for read-ahead and hit those GB/s+ seq bandwidth numbers at a QD of 1 for fairly small block sizes.
    With a (super?)capacitor you could also safely use say 8-16MB of that cache for write buffering and saturate the array.
  • GullLars - Thursday, June 30, 2011 - link

    Correction, RevoDrive 3 x2 benched 7K 4KB random read IOPS @ QD 1 in AS SSD.
  • Jharne - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link

    The INF mentions VEN_11AB & VEN_1B4B which are both Marvell. So I'm guessing they built the controller.
  • DigitalFreak - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link

    LOL. All the trouble they go through to hide the controller vendor and all you need to do is look at the vendor ID
  • VStrom - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link

    You can boot with this on x64 with an unsigned driver...you just need to load Windows with the signed driver validation disabled (F8 before Windows loads).
  • DanNeely - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link

    If you need to do this before every boot it's a non-option in the server world. In normal operation no keyboard/mouse/monitor will be attached, all interaction will be via remote desktop type services after it's booted.
  • VStrom - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link

    True, but I was referring to Andand's comment specifically about Win 7 saying "Windows 7 x64 won't boot off of the RevoDrive 3". When this ships, the driver will be ready and a non-issue for servers.
  • bacomatic - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - link

    Apparently this has been fixed, I am booting Win 7 x64 from this drive with the current drivers.
  • quiksilvr - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link

    I would have figured with this strong staple in the 2.5" SSD market with TRIM enabled devices this would not be hard to to.
  • mikeblas - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link

    Comparing this device against consumer-level SSDs seems like a waste of time. Why not compare against fusionio?

    I'd also like to see a benchmark that runs for a sustained period. The problem with SSD is the ability to keep up with write loads. If you run the 4K random IO benchmark for 48 hours, does the IOPS rate spike or trend downwards, or does it stay flat? The write ratio of your benchmark is around 33%, which I don't think represents OLTP applications too well.

    The review doesn't comment on the stability of the drivers, their memory usage on the host, or the management and monitoring tools for the drive. Do I get a tool that measures remaps, does SNMP, or email alerting?
  • SonicIce - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link

    lol last sentence >evironment
  • mmaestro - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link

    You can do secure erase, is there any sort of garbage cleanup tool they also supply for maintenance? I know Intel supplies these with their SSDs for if TRIM is unavailable, and that seems like something which you ought to have to make up for this shortcoming.

    It's a shame OCZ started you all off with such an expensive offering. I'd be far more interested in the performance of the Revodrive 3 (no x2) 120gb or 240gb.
  • don_k - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link

    I started reading this review, saw the specs and that they removed the pci-x bridge and said to myself "This thing is gonna hit 2GB/s sequential." Close.

    Man is this thing fast. It is very interesting especially on a enterprise environment and that is due to the data workload, nothing else.

    I personally have been running the original 120GB Revodrive (2 Sandforce 1200 controllers) and I've had absolutely zero reliability issues in 24x7 running on a linux box that is my personal workstation. Bought September 2010 so almost a year old now. I'd call that 'good', so far. Tentatively.

    So what is the driver used for this under Linux? Is there one? If Ocz have made changes to firmware then they need to release a driver for linux no?
  • skrewler2 - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link

    This thing probably wont be used by consumers. Why not at least include some more relevant DB benchmarks? tpcc would be a good place to start.
  • FunBunny2 - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link

    me too.
  • hurricanepkt - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link

    OCZ uses a pretty confusing model number schema. Are either of these the revodrive 3?
    It seems very difficult to tell
    OCZSSDPX-1RVD0240
    OCZSSDPX-1RVDX0240
  • Conficio - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link

    Dear Anand,
    first off all for doing what you do her. I have learned so much from your SSD (and other technology coverage).

    As you really have this powerful voice in the industry and have always used it in favor of the users and consumers I'd like you to shed more light on supported platforms of SSDs as part of your reviews and tests.

    I have at work a Mac Pro with a couple of 120GB OCZ Vertex SSDs which got corrupted by a power outage Monday morning. Not a big deal as the data on them was of temporary nature.

    However, my attempt to use that opportunity and secure erase the drives and may be update the firmware failed miserably:
    * OCZ does not make it easy to find the tools
    * OCZ makes you download a package for all platforms which then you have to select (w/o a guide) the "right" model and burn the tools on a CD
    * The Insturctions require to set BIOS modes for ATAPI, so are PC only
    * The required BIOS mode (IDE) is again PC only
    * Finally I had to use PC Laptop to to boot the CD and it painfully failed to boot because of some CD driver for the CD drive missing.

    So to actually restore the drive to factory conditions one needs to have some very specific hardware (if it works at all then, never got to that point).

    In my book this is clearly poor customer support and platform support. I'd like to see more details about the actually supported platforms for this new technology including the secure erase tooling (or other tooling that OCZ does provide, like some form of garbage collection tool).
  • neotiger - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link

    1) All the benchmarks are for desktop apps. I really doubt people would be buying PCIe SSD for "Starcraft II & WoW" (!!) Far more likely people would be using it for MySQL, Solr, Hadoop, VM. Can we get a benchmark based on those apps?

    2) You only tested random read at low queue depth and simply concluded that "Low queue depth random read performance is nothing to be impressed by." What about high queue depth? Random read IO at high concurrency and high queue depth is just about the *MOST* important metrics for server SSD uses -- yes even more important than random write IO. Yet you completely skip over that. Any chance you can update the benchmark to include results at high concurrency and high queue depth?
  • alphadog4 - Thursday, June 30, 2011 - link

    One way this review would be nice is if we built 4x80GB striped RAID with a SAS controller setup and compared. I'm just not sure what I am gaining here.
  • chadwilson - Thursday, June 30, 2011 - link

    I really really really would like to see some server testing done with server class devices. Specifically I'd like to see the testing done on a modern *nix kernel, as this type of device will likely see usage in this environment.
  • yuhong - Friday, July 1, 2011 - link

    Vista changed driver signing a lot. It added a kind of driver signing that do not require WHQL certification that meets the minimum requirements for 64-bit Vista and later fo load the driver.
  • bjacobson - Saturday, July 2, 2011 - link

    I know desktop users are not the market segment for these drives, but I'd very much like to see these benched in a way that shows us just how much they can help productivity-- IE, I'd like to see how fast a Windows install with about 50-100 startup programs can boot with one of these, in comparison with a harddrive.
  • not12quit - Friday, July 8, 2011 - link

    I have never understood, nor used raid but I am really interested in this drive as I use a lot of high i/o intensive, large file manipulating software.

    My question is if the drive has a 240gb capacity, does raid mean that you can actually only store 60gb of real data? ei 240/4 raid disks.

    thanks four your patience if this is a "dumb question"/
  • Hydrology - Tuesday, August 9, 2011 - link

    I would like to see how reliable these things are. I am still trying to get my Vertex 3's to stay up for more than a day without locking up or giving me a BSOD. There are thousends of us out there that bought these drives and are still hanging in limbo as OCZ continues with their "firmware of the week" program to try and make these drives stable. Until they can get the Vetex 3's stable, I wouldnt touch another OCZ product with a 10 foot pole. The fast speed is only usefull if the drive is dependable, and OCZ drives are NOT!
  • pchandra - Sunday, August 28, 2011 - link

    Where would FPS games fall - Heavy workload or Incompressible data transfer?

    What would be the expected through puts for games like Crysis 2, Mass Effect 2, Call of Duty (Entire series) Medal of Honor etc.
  • Frichico - Sunday, February 19, 2012 - link

    http://www.ebay.es/itm/120862274680?ssPageName=STR...
  • nakabaka - Thursday, March 14, 2013 - link

    I know this is an old forum but I'm having issues finding anything current on this drive, or at least after its release. I bought one and am playing games on it, granted all I play is WoW and EVE (I use it for a boot drive and use another SATA SSD as a storage drive). Said that Windows 7 64-bit can't boot from it, but for some reason I had no issue. Is that an indicator something is wrong or has it been fixed? (Probably a dumb question but just making sure.) Also, did they fix something about the TRIM support? I have fragmented drives because I thought it was supposed to be that way with TRIM and how it supposedly saves data to random spots to save cell lifetime (if I even understand it correctly), but if 7 64-bit doesn't support TRIM, does that mean I can defrag this thing for better performance?
  • nakabaka - Thursday, March 14, 2013 - link

    Also, sorry if that has already been answered, I've only been able to follow about half of this. Something about that it uses a SAS controller instead of a SATA controller to cut out more middle man kinda stuff with controller bridging (if I'm using correct terms) and that is what made it have so many issues.

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