OCZ RevoDrive 3 x2 480GB Review

1. Introduction2. OCZ RevoDrive 3 x2 480GB3. Testing Methodology4. CrystalDiskMark5. ATTO Disk Benchmark6. AS SSD7. IOMeter8. SiSoft Sandra9. Real World Testing10. Closing Thoughts11. View All Pages

While many people have yet to upgrade to a regular Solid State Storage drive, there are professional users who demand even more performance. For this high end audience, OCZ have specially crafted the RevoDrive 3 x2, which is said to be the fastest consumer drive by a considerable margin.

Gone are the limitations of the SATA 3 interface thanks to the PCI-Express interface. OCZ claim a speed of 1.5GB/s read and 1.25GB/s write with a throughput specification of up to 200,000 IOPS @ 4k random write. Yes, that isn't a misprint. we are talking 1GB/s+ performance, and then some.

The 480GB product we are testing today retails at a staggering £1,349.98 from leading UK retailer Dabs. Many enthusiast users will be looking at the 240GB version which is stocked for a more palatable £550 inc vat.

By using a PCIe x4 slot which is capable of 16 Gbps, OCZ are bypassing normal limitations, so performance should be staggeringly good.

OCZ are keen to point out that this drive is mostly targeted to workstation users who are need of that extreme performance level and who work with very demanding applications.

The OCZ Revodrive 3 X2 is nicely packaged, with a high resolution image of the product on the front of the box.

The inner box slides out to expose the bundle, including the drive which is packaged in an anti static bag. OCZ include a user manual detailing the installation instructions, and a tongue in cheek sticker which states ‘my SSD is faster than your HDD'.

The RevoDrive 3 x2 480GB is powered by a quad configuration of SF2281 controller chips. It is firmly aimed at the ultra high end consumer market. After formatting, there is around 447GB of storage available.

“The RevoDrive 3 X2 provides unique benefits to users by incorporating features from the VCA 2.0 flash virtualization software that allow certain direct memory access (DMA) and data management functions. Included in this feature-set are OCZ’s exclusive command queuing and queue balancing algorithms, which can be handled by the onboard processing core for higher performance and reduced burden on the host resources. VCA 2.0 is also the only virtualization layer in the industry with TRIM and SCSI unmap support to enhance sustained performance and provide greater endurance by significantly reducing the overhead associated with garbage collection. Furthermore, VCA also offers consolidated SMART support and provides system administrators with advanced features for monitoring, analyzing, and reporting device attributes.”

Installing the drive is straightforward, simply use an available PCI-E 4x (or better) slot on the motherboard. OCZ have detailed a handy motherboard support guide which you can view over here. It is worth pointing out that some motherboards may limit speeds, depending on the specific slot and graphics card configuration.

The image above highlights the layout of the product. There is a main PCB board underneath, with a daughter card mounted on top. Each of these layers shares half of the NAND memory and controller chips. There are not one, not two, but four Sandforce SF-2281 controllers to handle all the tasty features, such as TRIM, data compression and error correction.

Earlier versions of the drive sent to press didn't have the heatsink which is pictured above. This has been included to help manage temperatures under extended, heavy load.

OCZ are using 25nm Micron MLC flash (29F64G08CBAAA), asynchronous by design and built around 64GB die configurations.

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.

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

Comparison system (SATA 3 interface):
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 Ultimate
Monitor: Dell U2410

Other Drives for comparisons:
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
Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB

Software:
Atto Disk Benchmark
HD Tach
CrystalMark
AS-SSD Benchmark
IOMeter
SiSoft Sandra
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 fastest results we have seen, even without enabling the 0x00 fill option.

Overall performance is as we would hope, class leading. We then retested with the alternative ‘compressible’ setting called 0×00 fill.

Staggering results, achieving over 1200MB/s in the write test. 4k QD32 performance is easily the highest we have seen, with no other drive even getting close.

Sequential read and write performance is way out in front, delivering more than twice the performance of the leading SATA 3 interface drives with a single SF2281 controller. Just check out the 4k QD32 write performance!

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 graph says it all, between two and three times the performance of the closest Sandforce drive.

AS SSD is a great free tool designed just for benching Solid State Drives. It performs an array of sequential read and write tests, as well as random read and write tests with sequential access times over a portion of the drive. AS SSD includes a sub suite of benchmarks with various file pattern algorithms but this is difficult in trying to judge accurate performance figures.

AS SSD uses incompressible data so the results are lower than some of the other tests today. Regardless, the Revodrive 3 x2 shows huge performance gains when compared with the regular SATA 3 Sandforce powered drives. The results are particularly strong in the 4k and 4k-64Thrd tests, around twice the performance of the 240gb MAX IOPS drive.

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.

As we are using a 990X processor with 6 physical and 6 logical cores we set up a multiple manager configuration for this particular drive. We set up a queue depth of 64.

Iometer performance almost met the target of 200,000 IOPS, reaching 198,928. We did see a few peaks over 200,000 but it averaged out a little lower. Still, staggering results overall.

SiSoft Sandra is a benchmark tool that we use fairly regularly, it is a good all round synthetic software suite. Today we are obviously concentrating on the drive sections to ascertain the SSD performance levels.

SiSoft Sandra isn't really the best test for the latest SSD drives, but as we can see, the results are significantly higher than any of the other drives we have tested before.

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. With the downloaded driver, the RevoDrive 3 X2 can be configured as a boot drive. Not all motherboards can support boot over PCIe at this time, but we had no problems when using the Asus motherboard in our test bed with the latest bios update.

Please be aware that the results above are not directly comparable as we are using a different motherboard and system configuration with the Revodrive 3 x2 480GB (Asus X58 Rampage III Black Edition).

The RevoDrive 3 x2 480GB loads the level in 13 seconds, compared with 17 for the previous leader – the MAX IOPS. Again these results are not directly comparable as the Revodrive is running via a different system, with a 990x and Asus Black Edition motherboard.

To say that the OCZ RevoDrive 3 x2 480GB is fast would be the understatement of the year. It is easily the fastest drive we have tested, by a long shot. Obviously, the price means that it will be targeting a very small audience – gamers with large salaries and enthusiast users who want the fastest possible performance for video editing and streaming data. It is clearly not only built for the rich enthusiast, but for the professional sector.

Again we can't rate this drive on cost alone, because it is designed for a very specific audience. Money is almost irrelevant in this sector.

At £1,350 inc vat, this is going to be out of reach for almost everyone, however if you are lucky enough to be able to afford it, then there is no doubt that it will transform your system into a lightning fast, ultra responsive power house. When matched up with our overclocked Intel Core i7 990x @ 4.8ghz, ASUS Rampage III Black Edition and Nvidia GTX580 we had pretty much built what we would class as the ‘ultimate system'.

OCZ create some of the finest Solid State Drives on the market, and this is certainly a showcase, highlighting their engineering capabilities. The OCZ configuration is in a class of its own – The proprietary Virtualised Controller Architecture 2.0, SuperScale Storage Accelerator and a quad configuration of Sandforce SF-2281 chips delivers performance levels previously only imagined.

The 240GB version of this product will prove to be more popular, as it retails for around £550 including VAT.

If you are fortunate enough to have a large enough bank balance and need the fastest performing flash drive on the market, then this is surely a ‘must have'. Pair it up with the new Asus Mars II graphics card and a Intel Core i7 processor then you won't need an upgrade for a while.

The RevoDrive 3 x2 is an enthusiast user's wet dream.

Pros:

• Performance in a class of its own.
• Installation and drive configuration is bullet proof.
• Its bootable with a compatible motherboard.
• Available in capacities from 240GB to 960 GB.

Cons:

• It ain't cheap.

Kitguru says: An engineering showcase from the SSD leaders.

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