OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid 1TB HDD/SSD Review

1. Introduction2. OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid 1TB HDD/SSD3. OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid 1TB HDD/SSD (Installation)4. OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid 1TB HDD/SSD (Super High Res Gallery)5. Testing Methodology6. CrystalDiskMark7. ATTO Disk Benchmark8. PCMark 79. IOMeter10. Real World Testing11. Closing Thoughts12. View All Pages

The Solid State Drive industry has been rolling ahead at an incredible pace this year, with many companies releasing a range of performance drives for demanding enthusiast users. OCZ have been at the forefront of this market, with a portfolio of quality drives targeting a wide audience. Today we are looking at their latest product – the OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid 1TB, which is a combination of Solid State and mechanical drive technology … at a very exciting price point.

One of the negative aspects when buying a Solid State Drive is the relatively small storage capacity, especially when factoring in the price. A select audience don't always understand why they are asked to fork out £150 for a 128GB SSD, when a 1TB mechanical drive can be bought for less than £50. Educating the ‘average' punter on ‘speed v capacity' isn't always straightforward.

OCZ Technology have created a new ‘Hybrid' drive which combines the speed of a Solid State Drive, with the capacity of a mechanical drive. They claim this PCIe based RevoDrive Hybrid “not only eliminates the SATA bottleneck to unleash groundbreaking bandwidth and landmark IOPS performance, but it also includes a high-capacity hard disk drive and intelligent software that integrates SSD and HDD into a single high-performance and high-capacity storage solution.”

Thanks to the use of clever caching software this could be the breakthrough that most people have been waiting for. Frequently used hot data stays on the SSD drive while the cold data remains on the slower, but larger mechanical drive. OCZ are using advanced caching algorithms to learn and adapt to user behaviour. OCZ are classing this as the ‘next generation storage' system. Can it deliver the goods?

Our review sample arrived hot from the production line and the box art is dramatic, highlighting the unusual shape of the device on the front.

The outer shell of the packaging slides away to reveal the inner box. The company logo and product name are all that is printed here. Nothing more dramatic than black and white however.

The user manual is the only ‘extra' in the box. It is well written and easy to follow, which is just as well as setting the device up is a little more complex than normal. We will detail the installation procedure on the next page.

The RevoDrive Hybrid is an unusual looking beast and is basically a PCI E based SSD unit with a 2.5 inch hard drive slotted into the upper layer. It measures 167.64 x 98.42 x 22.15 mm (without the bracket) and it weighs 289g.

OCZ have placed their own sticker over the top of the hard drive, but we can see underneath that it is a 1TB Toshiba 5,400 rpm unit. The card is PCI Express Gen 2 x4. OCZ rate the MTBF at 600,000 hours.

The intelligent caching software manages both the solid state memory and the mechanical drive, meaning that optimum performance will be gained after using the device for a while. The algorithms adapt to the users system of working, ensuring that the most accessed data is on the SSD drive. OCZ are using a SuperScale Storage Accelerator which uses a unique command queuing structure with balancing algorithms. This leads to higher performance and reduced load on the host processor.

OCZ also use a proprietary Virtualised Controller Architecture. This is the only virtualisation in the industry with full support for TRIM and SCSI unmap. There is 100GB of SSD storage on the PCB to pair up with the 1TB of mechanical storage. OCZ are using 24nm Multi Level Cell (MLC) with a dual Sandforce 2281 controller architecture.

The drive uses ECC recovery and is rated up to 55 bits correctable per 512 byte sector. The encryption is 128 bit and 256 bit AES-compliant. There is self monitoring, analysis and reporting technology (SMART) support onboard.

Installing the OCZ RevoDrive requires a free PCIe slot and a compatible motherboard. For our review today we used the excellent Asus Rampage III Black Edition.

For best results, it is necessary to install the Revo Hybrid as a primary drive in order for the set-up to work properly. If we try to test the Hybrid as a secondary drive, the software will use the primary drive instead of using the Hybrid’s own hard drive. If you aren't a bios guru, the best way to get around this is to temporarily disconnect all other drives while installing the operating system on the RevoDrive Hybrid.

The dual drive configuration of the RevoDrive Hybrid, correctly detected by the Asus Rampage III Black Edition bios. Painfree so far.

Getting the RevoDrive Hybrid detected will require a download of the driver files from OCZ's website, these aren't supplied in the box. It may sound like extra inconvenience, however it ensures you always get the latest revision.

Once the driver is installed, the RevoDrive Hybrid will appear in the list. Above is an example of how NOT to install the RevoDrive Hybrid. We already had a 2TB drive in our system build and it is set to primary. This won't work right.

Yes, that is more like it, just the RevoDrive unit is showing now. You will see two drives listed, the 93.2GB ‘disk' is the SSD drive and the 931.5GB listing is for the mechanical drive. We want to install the operating system to the larger, mechanical drive. The reason for this is simple, the SSD portion of the RevoDrive Hybrid is used for caching later, after the Windows software is installed.

Be prepared for a rather sluggish Windows install, as at this stage the RevoDrive Hybrid is solely using the 5,400 rpm 2.5 inch drive.

The product downloads page on the OCZ site has the software which we need to download for the Hybrid drive. We have to register the product with OCZ, by keying in a name, email address and serial number of the product (on a sticker on the back of the drive). OCZ then allow you to download the Dataplex software, which is required to be able to use the complex caching algorithms between SSD and HDD.

A simple restart is required for the drive to configure itself correctly. Performance will improve over subsequent rebooting.

A single drive is now ready and available within Windows 7, with a total storage capacity of 931GB.

On this page we present some super high resolution images of the product taken with the 24.5MP Nikon D3X camera and 24-70mm ED lens. These will take much longer to open due to the dimensions, especially on slower connections. If you use these pictures on another site or publication, please credit Kitguru.net as the owner/source.

For testing, the drives are all wiped and reset to factory settings by HDDerase V4. We try to use free or easily available programs and some real world testing so you can compare our findings against your own system.

This is a good way to measure potential upgrade benefits.

Main test system (PCIe drives):

OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid 1TB HDD/SSD &
OCZ RevoDrive 3 x2 480GB Test System:
CPU: Intel Core i7 990x @ 4.8ghz
Cooler: Corsair H100 Performance Liquid Cooler
Motherboard: Asus Rampage III Black Edition
Memory: 12GB Kingston DDR3 @ 1600mhz 9-9-9-24
PSU: ADATA 1200W
Graphics: Nvidia GTX580
Chassis: Lian Li X2000F
Operating System: Windows 7 64 bit Enterprise
Monitor: Dell U2410

Compare system:

CPU: Intel Core i7 2600k
Cooler: Thermaltake Frio OCK
Motherboard: Asus P8P67 Deluxe
Memory: ADATA DDR3 2000mhz 9-11-9-24
PSU: ADATA 1200W
Graphics: Sapphire HD6950 Flex Edition
Chassis: Thermaltake Level 10 GT
Operating System: Windows 7 64 bit Enterprise
Monitor: Dell U2410

Other Drives (used in Core i7 2600k system above):
MemoRight FTM Plus 240GB SSD Review
Patriot Pyro 120GB SSD
OCZ RevoDrive 3 x2 480GB
Patriot Wildfire 120GB SSD OCZ Agility 3 240GB
OCZ Vertex 3 240GB
OCZ Vertex 3 MAX IOPS 240GB
ADATA S511 240GB
Intel 510 120GB
Corsair F100 100GB
OCZ Vertex 2 120GB
Crucial Real SSD C300 64GB
MemoRight FTM.25 115GB SSD
Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB

Software:
Atto Disk Benchmark
CrystalMark
IOMeter
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call Of Pripyat

All our results were achieved by running each test five times with every configuration this ensures that any glitches are removed from the results. Trim is confirmed as running by typing fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify into the command line. A response of disabledeletenotify =0 confirms TRIM is active.

Crystalmark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V3.0 x64.

The RevoDrive Hybrid benefits from multiple runs, as the data gets cached in the drive. Above we show the first run of the drive with CrystalDiskMark. These are already impressive results, showing 744 MB/s sequential read and 690 MB/s sequential write. 4k QD32 performance is also very impressive.

By the fourth run, performance has increased to 800 MB/s read and 700 MB/s write. We noticed some fluctuation with the 4k and 4k QD32 results, but The QD32 results always averaged between 130 MB/s and 145 MB/s read and 440 MB/s and 470 MB/s write.

4K QD32 performance is a little lower when it comes to the read test, averaging between 130.3 MB/s and 150 MB/s. Write performance however is class leading, just falling behind the RevoDrive 3 x2 480 GB at 441.4 MB/s

Compare against:

The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.

The first run was very impressive, peaking at around 980 MB/s read and 790 MB/s write.

The second run improves overall performance from 0.5k to 4k although we noticed a few drops around 512k and 1024k. 256k read performance peaked around 900 MB/s.

The third run improved performance in almost all sections of the results especially between 64k and 1024k. Subsequent runs didn't really improve performance any further, with only minor fluctuation between runs.

Compare against:

The RevoDrive Hybrid slots in directly behind the RevoDrive 3 x2 480GB, which is a considerable distance in front.

PCMark 7 includes 7 PC tests for Windows 7, combining more than 25 individual workloads covering storage, computation, image and video manipulation, web browsing and gaming. Specifically designed to cover the full range of PC hardware from netbooks and tablets to notebooks and desktops, PCMark 7 offers complete PC performance testing for Windows 7 for home and business use.

We noticed modest gains after several runs of the benchmark, although the first run was actually quite impressive considering it hadn't had the chance to cache much of the data beforehand.

IOMeter is another open source synthetic benchmarking tool which is able to simulate the various loads placed on hard drive and solid state drive technology.

We are using a custom 4k sequential read test today to measure IOPS performance.

The drive returned an IOPS score of almost 73,000 which is very positive. OCZ claim up to 120,000 IOPS with a 4k random write test, but we only managed to get around 88,000 with our own settings as we aren't aware of how OCZ achieved their claimed figures. Still, it is more than capable.

It doesn’t matter how good any of the synthetic suites are, the real meat of the testing has to be under absolute real world conditions. This proves difficult as to record results we have to narrow down fluctuation. Therefore while we would say these are the most useful results to get from this review, there is always going to be a slight margin for error – its not absolutely scientific.

Firstly we installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit Edition onto each of the drives and performed a clean update from Microsoft with all patches and security fixes. We then install a basic suite of software, such as Office, Firefox and Adobe Design, then we install AVG free antivirus. We used a digital watch for this startup and repeated the test five times for each drive – once we had these five results we averaged the results and took that for the final figure.

We allowed the RevoDrive Hybrid 1TB to reboot 10 times and measured the increases in performance as the algorithms optimised data paging.

First boot up time is pretty much as we would expect from a mechanical drive without the paging algorithms in place. After the 5th boot, the time is reduced to 27 seconds and by the 10th boot, this has improved further to 20 seconds. We noticed no more gains, after this.

Our STALKER level load showed a 34 second first time result, only slightly faster than a standard mechanical drive. On 3rd load this had reduced to 22 seconds, and we reached a peak of 18 seconds after the 5th boot. Excellent results, even if it was one second slower than the MAX IOPS drive.

The OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid 1TB is a marvelous design concept and one that will resolve the concern of needing to buy a larger mechanical storage drive when used in tandem with a solid state boot drive.

The caching software really works well and by simply using the drive for a short while, the performance will improve noticeably. Synthetic testing is important to measure potential throughput and response times, but the real world is where it really matters the most. In this regard, the RevoDrive Hybrid doesn't disappoint – I used the drive for several days in a system build and it seemed to improve over the course of a day, finally settling at a performance level I was very happy with.

While it can't keep up with the ‘pure' structure of the ultimate performance RevoDrive 3 X2 480GB, generally it outperforms most other solid state drives on the market. Throughput is class leading and it makes for an ideal boot drive, settling right at the top of our chart, behind the RevoDrive 3 X2 480GB.

OCZ rate the drive as having a maximum rating of up to 910 MB/s read and 800 MB/s write. We recorded read speeds close to 1GB/s via the ATTO Disk Benchmark, which really is impressive.

So the big question is, how much would you expect this to cost? The RevoDrive 3 x2 480GB costs close to £1,300 and is priced out of the market for 99% of people reading this. OCZ are aware of this and the hybrid system design means they have been able to drop the price to £389.99 inc vat. Sure, it isn't as fast, but double the storage for less than one third of the price seems like a good selling point to us.

At that price we have absolutely no hesitation in recommending the OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid, it performs right at the top of the current crop of drives while offering huge storage capacity.

We can see this ‘Hybrid' technology getting even better as time passes, with improved algorithms and further revisions released to market. We are waiting for a 2TB dual drive option with 200GB SSD!

Pros:

• Price is fantastic.
• performance is stunning.
• Tons of storage ‘out of the box'.
• One of the fastest boot drives we have tested to date.

Cons:

• Needs a little time for the caching system to ‘settle'.
• Installation procedure might scare a few people.

Kitguru says: Another win for OCZ, one of the best ideas we have seen in a long time.

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