OCZ RevoDrive PCIe 4x RAID SSD Solid State Drive Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
922 words · ~4 min read
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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
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bootable PCI Express solid state drive. It offers unmatched performance. It is
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sandforce driven. It runs off PCI Express Gen 2 X4 and it has internal
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RAID zero. So that's all the stuff off the front of the box, which is pretty
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much all they needed to say about it. It's what they didn't say surprisingly
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is that this is actually the first PCI Expressbased SSD that brings the price
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point down to something that would make it actually a reasonable replacement for
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a SATA based SSD. So, the Revo drive uses an onboard RAID zero uh PCI Express
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just basically it's just a little RAID controller chip. I'll uh I'll show it to
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you once we've actually got this open and I can show you the drive itself. So,
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all it's really doing is it's taking more flash chips and it's running them
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with two controllers and just running it
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in RAID zero. And then instead of having to deal with the bottleneck of the SATA
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2 interface, OCZ hooks you up with a
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little RAID controller and a PCI Express interface, and that's how you get all
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that performance out of it. So, here I'll uh here, hold on. Let's see what's
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included with it first. Uh under here is nothing. comes in nice little package
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here. Okay, they got a little my SSD is faster than your hard drive, which is
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true. In 99.99999% of cases, SSDs are much faster
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than hard drives. Here's a quick installation guide. Locate a slot, put it in, how to
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boot to the Revo Drive, okay, and installing Windows on your Revo Drive.
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Fairly straightforward. So, the only extra steps you really need to do with a
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Revo drive are to configure it to be bootable, which is basically like
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configuring any RAID controller to be bootable, and then you just need to
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install the RAID controller driver when you're installing Windows, which is uh
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actually with Windows Vista and Windows 7, dead easy. So, pretty much anyone
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should be able to use one of these for their boot drive. This is a full height
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card, okay? And I'm just going to show you all the main components here. So,
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first of all, this is Oh, wow. Look at
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that. They've actually got a wire soldered on here. So, I guess they made
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a last minute PCB revision. And looks like they actually had to do some custom
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wiring. Now, something to be aware of is that this will not cause any long-term
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effects because really a wire running on the outside of the PCB is exactly the
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same as any other trace or wire running on the inside of the PCB. But I was just
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I was a little bit surprised to see that. Very cool. Okay. So, here we have
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You know what? This may actually be the uh I believe it's a silicon image uh
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RAID controller chip. Let me see if it actually says on their box. I hope it
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does because I hate to uh I hate to not
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know. Oh well, not a whole lot I can do about it, but I believe this is actually
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a PCI RAID chip. I believe this chip is
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actually a PCI Express to PCI bridge
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chip. And then these are two SanForce
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SSD controllers. So what happens is the
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PCI Express interface here is converted into a PCI compatible signal, but you
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still get all of that bandwidth. Okay, this this one is running RAID between
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the two sandforce controllers. So basically, you see this, okay, we've got
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eight here and then eight chips on the
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back. So 16 chips. Those ones are running off this sandforce controller.
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And then the other 16 chips on the PCB are running off the other SanForce
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controller. So that means that you get effectively double the total
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performance, double the total bandwidth out of a Revo drive that you do out of a
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single Sandforce SSD. So basically, if you if you cut this up like this and
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then stuck a SATA 2 controller on there, then that that would be it. That would
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be one forcebased SSD. So OCZ with a little bit of extra cost, a little bit
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of engineering knowhow, has turned it into something that you can just plug in
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and you're running RAID zero with just
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one thing. Pretty cool. It's not really that different from what they've done in
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the past with the Z drive. The biggest difference is that now it's affordable.
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Anyway, I wouldn't be really doing my job unless I told you what the performance numbers are like. So with 4K
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random rights, they're promising up to 75,000 IOPS. And with uh sustained reads
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and sustained rights up to 540 megabytes per second read and 480 megabytes per
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second right peak and then 400 megabytes per second sustained right. So these are
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huge performance numbers and I think we've had a pretty good look at the Revo
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drive. And one thing that OCZ has figured out that it seems like a lot of
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other companies don't is performance parts should have a black PCB. Thank you
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for that.