OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid 1TB HDD/SSD Review

Rating: 9.0.

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?

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