back to article OCZ RevoDrive 3 X2 240GB PCI-E SSD

Extreme PC Week One wonders if, after ratifying the SATA 6Gb/s standard, the people at the SATA-IO (Serial ATA International Organization) gave themselves a pat on the back to say job well done, that’s that future-proofed for a while, we can relax now. OCZ RevoDrive 3 X2 240GB PCI-E SSD Scorchio: OCZ's RevoDrive 3 X2 …

COMMENTS

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Until the price can be brought down large drives will be part of a very niche market.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Amazing, someone designs the new Ferrari/Aston Martin of the SSD world, yet just like the cars the price makes it available for the richest 10% of the population.

    I question whether the unit cost needs to be that expensive or not. Takes you back the advent of the then sata drives...... Now they are as cheap as chips.

    1. TeeCee Gold badge
      Coat

      "Now they are as cheap as chips."

      Actually these things are, by definition, as cheap as chips. It's just that the chips are quite expensive....

  3. Bubba Von Braun
    FAIL

    Dont use more than one in a system

    High Price, and appalling support, bad quality (heat sinks falling off them!). Tried to use two in a system and was abruptly told to go buy their enterprise drives at $5k each if I wanted to do a software raid with them.

    Have earlier Revo Products and they work fine in this configuration. But it seems OCZ will do anything to drive folks to the enterprise market including alienating them.

    All I can say is HELLLOOO FusionIO!!

    1. Bronek Kozicki
      Go

      Re: Dont use more than one in a system

      Just put together proper hardware RAID with commodity SSDs, it's cheaper than Revo. Personally I can recommend LSI 9265 with FastPath.

    2. David Strum
      IT Angle

      Re: Dont use more than one in a system

      Why would you want to RAID with this thing? Unless your doing a Mirror for security, its more designed for speed – and should not be used as you would old hard drives. It’ll be like wanting peddles on a brand-new motorbike.

  4. James Turner

    Really the end of sata?

    I'd say these PCIe flash cards merely reaffirm sata/sas, as they all seem to be made up of sata drives and a raid controller, it's just instead of a sata cable, it's a trace on the pcb.

    1. Lance 3

      Re: Really the end of sata?

      That is what they have today. To keep costs down they are using off the shelf components. Down the road, they could easily bypass the SATA/SAS portion. Sandforce or one of the others could easily make a controller that provides access to a PCIe bus and have direct access to the FLASH chips.

      It is really only a matter of time before you see SATA/SAS go away and you PCIe slots in computers for storage. Even a NAS or SAN could go with PCIe.

      The current technology is still in its infancy and we will soon see what it can really do.

  5. Andrew Baines Silver badge
    Facepalm

    No space in my PC

    Graphics card takes up 2 of the slots. Next unusable as it would block the gfx fan, next has a usb 3 header. Just no space for anything else.

    On the other side of the case, there's space for 8 HDDs. SSDs have dropped in price so much, they're becoming affordable, bit of RAID and off you go.

    Until mobo designers start to include more PCI slots, this technology isn't for me.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: No space in my PC

      I still think I could have bought 1TB of storage instead of that 60GB SSD. But then again, loading screens are sooo bearable now... and my GFX also takes 2 slots. And I found an extra tray for HDD behind the PSU, where I don't even have to disassemble nothing else to reach it...you gotta love Full-ATX cases. But no room on PCI or PCI-e slots.

      But... one extra TB... or maybe 2 at same price tag... sigh.

    2. David Strum
      Boffin

      Re: No space in my PC

      That’s a thing that got me – with the small connection strip it has – I thought it was going into one of those PCI x1 slots – not a PCI-E Gfx-card slot. It’s a bit of a stop gap solution really; bit too late once you’ve bought it.

  6. Mikel
    Thumb Up

    Cheap?

    Amazing how much the prices have come down on the PCIe attached SSD.

  7. Dare to Think
    IT Angle

    This is the future

    As with everything in IT, the price of PCIe SSDs will come down and they will scale vertically - very soon a 20TB PCIe SSD will be available for £300.

    In parallel, motherboard manufacturers will solder a SSD chip on their boards as a giveaway, and after that the SSD chip will be part and parcel of the CPU - by that time we may have 10mn or 5mn lithography.

    Which means a dedicated SAN will be dead. I mean, seriously, if we have 20, 50, or 100TB on a PCIe card close to the northbridge of the CPU, and 10GigEth networks for the 4 way DRBD, why wasting more money on a separate SAN system.

    Did I say will? SAN IS dead, if you have enough budget.

    1. Matt Piechota

      Re: This is the future

      "Which means a dedicated SAN will be dead. I mean, seriously, if we have 20, 50, or 100TB on a PCIe card close to the northbridge of the CPU, and 10GigEth networks for the 4 way DRBD, why wasting more money on a separate SAN system."

      Unless you want to run a cluster (especially VMs). Or have failover hardware. Or want to manage backups centrally.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      NAND technology limits

      Unfortunately with the durability of NAND cells decreasing with cell size, technology seems to already be pretty close to the point of diminishing returns - i.e. chip features cannot be shrunk much further - so the usual more-for-less-with-each-year scaling may not apply to flash based SSDs. But quite likely there will be a successor technology.

      However I can't say I have much confidence in the reliability of non-enterprise SSD - but after thinking a bit about this technology shift we are starting to change to SSD on production servers that have significant random I/O activity, DRBD'd onto a standby machine that has good old spinning disk.

      I'm toying with the idea of using Seagate's hybrid drives for VMs that need a greater volume of data than we can presently afford to put on SSD.

    3. Bronek Kozicki

      Re: This is the future

      You are too optimistic, or like to wait decades

    4. JEDIDIAH
      Linux

      The so-called future.

      I'm still waiting for 20TB of storage of any kind to get down to the $600 price point.

      Chances are that it will be spinny disk and that SSD will lag very far behind.

      1. Tom 38

        Re: The so-called future.

        12 x 2TB spinning rust in a ZFS 2x6 raidz would give you ~20 TB of storage for around £780 + VAT. (and controller, although I get away with using onboard SATA and cheap 2 port pci-e x1 adaptors)

        1. JEDIDIAH
          Linux

          Re: The so-called future.

          That's a monstrous array that probably has a few hidden gotchas in terms of cost and it's still twice as expensive. 4TB drives aren't even cheap and plentiful yet. Who knows when larger drives will finally hit the market.

    5. David Strum
      Windows

      Re: This is the future

      "the price of PCIe SSDs will come down and they will scale vertically - very soon a 20TB PCIe SSD will be available for £300." That’s a very optimistic comment – totally detached from reality – honestly – you’re not paying for the technology – you’re paying for the cutting edge slice of Techno-mania. In any case, SSDs may come down in price – but there will always be something that’s “better.” They want us to keep chasing "Puff" the Techno-dragon; and we will never get to the point when we have all that we want: I was happy with my i7 for a few months – they Sandybridge came out: pointless.

  8. JustNiz

    Somewhat frustrating that the article assumes all its readers are only windows users.

    How about including some words about compatibility with Linux and other OS's?

  9. Turtle_Fan

    So, no change there then....

    So other than price (and even that, marginally so) what is different to the Z-drives of 2010?

    Nothing much, unfortunately.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Why

    Why needs this sort of speed anyway?

    1. David Strum
      Coffee/keyboard

      Re: Why

      Good question, because this does not seem to have made my Windows 7 installation boot faster. Or maybe it was already fast. Its great for video editing though – or apps where you lob huge files around. For its price – it’s not worth it. But us geeks want the speed rush – it’s a rush alright – 5 mins or there abouts – it lasted.

  11. lauri_hoefs
    Meh

    To bypass SATA?

    But these cards are pretty much a SAS RAID controller with four attached SAS/SATA disks in RAID0.

    They are not any faster than an equivalent RAID0 configuration with discrete drives would be, and that is not the point anyway. They offer the same performance in a more compact form factor than several disks and a controller, and I think THAT is the main idea behind these cards.

  12. special specialist
    Linux

    Linux?

    Any information if this piece of hardware can be used with linux like (open)suse, ubuntu etc? Are there drivers available.

    Also performance on linux would be nice to see....

    1. Tom 38

      Re: Linux?

      I've used the earlier version on BSD, where it presents 4 ATA drives for you to use. Can't remember if they presented as AHCI or ATA, but worked out of the box, no drivers required.

      At least on that version, the board was basically two SiI SATA controllers, each hooked up to two Sandforce based SSDs.

      1. Turtle_Fan

        Re: Linux?

        Correct.

        It apprears as one logical SAS drive and can be booted and used just like any old spinny drive. I've tested with Ubuntu, Kubuntu and formatted it under ext 2,3 and 4, no issues.

        I just get the nagging feeling that maybe Ubuntu is also doing some win-like auto defrag in the background and I don't know how to disable it.

  13. David Strum
    Terminator

    Amazing, but only buy if you’re going to need it – not out of fanboy curiosity

    I got one! I got one! Err – what now? Win7 still loads similar to my RAID array; maybe I’m just spoilt. I basically wanted to eliminate the HD bottle-neck when video editing. The figures are amazing – on average 750 MB/s and peaking at 1000 MB/s – that’s very impressive. There is just one thing you need to bare in mind with Revo Drives, and I suspect most other SSDs, they don’t take kindly to BSOD episodes. They can be bricked by them; you need to take care and not treat it like a normal SATA or IDE Hard Drive.

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