but then I wouldn't have anywhere to put stuff. Okay, today we're going to be unboxing the OCZ Revo drive. This is a
bootable PCI Express solid state drive. It offers unmatched performance. It is
sandforce driven. It runs off PCI Express Gen 2 X4 and it has internal
RAID zero. So that's all the stuff off the front of the box, which is pretty
much all they needed to say about it. It's what they didn't say surprisingly
is that this is actually the first PCI Expressbased SSD that brings the price
point down to something that would make it actually a reasonable replacement for
a SATA based SSD. So, the Revo drive uses an onboard RAID zero uh PCI Express
just basically it's just a little RAID controller chip. I'll uh I'll show it to
you once we've actually got this open and I can show you the drive itself. So,
all it's really doing is it's taking more flash chips and it's running them
with two controllers and just running it
in RAID zero. And then instead of having to deal with the bottleneck of the SATA
2 interface, OCZ hooks you up with a
little RAID controller and a PCI Express interface, and that's how you get all
that performance out of it. So, here I'll uh here, hold on. Let's see what's
included with it first. Uh under here is nothing. comes in nice little package
here. Okay, they got a little my SSD is faster than your hard drive, which is
true. In 99.99999% of cases, SSDs are much faster
than hard drives. Here's a quick installation guide. Locate a slot, put it in, how to
boot to the Revo Drive, okay, and installing Windows on your Revo Drive.
Fairly straightforward. So, the only extra steps you really need to do with a
Revo drive are to configure it to be bootable, which is basically like
configuring any RAID controller to be bootable, and then you just need to
install the RAID controller driver when you're installing Windows, which is uh
actually with Windows Vista and Windows 7, dead easy. So, pretty much anyone
should be able to use one of these for their boot drive. This is a full height
card, okay? And I'm just going to show you all the main components here. So,
first of all, this is Oh, wow. Look at
that. They've actually got a wire soldered on here. So, I guess they made
a last minute PCB revision. And looks like they actually had to do some custom
wiring. Now, something to be aware of is that this will not cause any long-term
effects because really a wire running on the outside of the PCB is exactly the
same as any other trace or wire running on the inside of the PCB. But I was just
I was a little bit surprised to see that. Very cool. Okay. So, here we have
You know what? This may actually be the uh I believe it's a silicon image uh
RAID controller chip. Let me see if it actually says on their box. I hope it
does because I hate to uh I hate to not
know. Oh well, not a whole lot I can do about it, but I believe this is actually
a PCI RAID chip. I believe this chip is
actually a PCI Express to PCI bridge
chip. And then these are two SanForce
SSD controllers. So what happens is the
PCI Express interface here is converted into a PCI compatible signal, but you
still get all of that bandwidth. Okay, this this one is running RAID between
the two sandforce controllers. So basically, you see this, okay, we've got
eight here and then eight chips on the
back. So 16 chips. Those ones are running off this sandforce controller.
And then the other 16 chips on the PCB are running off the other SanForce
controller. So that means that you get effectively double the total
performance, double the total bandwidth out of a Revo drive that you do out of a
single Sandforce SSD. So basically, if you if you cut this up like this and
then stuck a SATA 2 controller on there, then that that would be it. That would
be one forcebased SSD. So OCZ with a little bit of extra cost, a little bit
of engineering knowhow, has turned it into something that you can just plug in
and you're running RAID zero with just
one thing. Pretty cool. It's not really that different from what they've done in
the past with the Z drive. The biggest difference is that now it's affordable.
Anyway, I wouldn't be really doing my job unless I told you what the performance numbers are like. So with 4K
random rights, they're promising up to 75,000 IOPS. And with uh sustained reads
and sustained rights up to 540 megabytes per second read and 480 megabytes per
second right peak and then 400 megabytes per second sustained right. So these are
huge performance numbers and I think we've had a pretty good look at the Revo
drive. And one thing that OCZ has figured out that it seems like a lot of
other companies don't is performance parts should have a black PCB. Thank you
for that.