OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid 1TB PCI-E SSD Review

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SSD drives undoubtedly are extremely fast, with their speeds being only limited by the bandwidth of the SATA bus interface. However they also remain disproportionately expensive per GB when compared to mechanical drives, forbidding mainstream customers from purchasing large capacity drives. For those who require a fairly large primary drive and want to reap the benefits of SSD technology, several companies developed caching solutions, such as the Synapse which we reviewed several weeks ago. OCZ however offers another interesting product, the RevoDrive Hybrid 1TB. The RevoDrive Hybrid is a ready-to-go storage solution which couples a 1TB mechanical drive with a 128GB SSD cache in the form of a PCI-E device. In this review we will find out not only how well it compares against SSD drives but when compared to other caching solutions as well.Manufacturer features and specifications

• Available in 1TB Capacity
• 100GB Dedicated Cache
• PCI-Express Gen. 2 x4 Interface
• Full height form factor
• OCZ SuperScale Storage Controller
• Virtualized Controller Architecture 2.0
• Included Caching Software Key
• ECC, Encryption
• SMART monitoring
• 167.64 (L) x 98.42 (W) x 22.15mm (H)
• Weight: 289g
• Operating Temp: 5°C ~ 50°C
• Storage Temp: 0°C ~ 60°C
• Power Consumption: 8.1W idle, 10W active
• MTBF: 600,000 hours
• 3-Year Warranty
• Compatible with Windows 7 32-bit and 64-bit

Max Performance

• Read: Up to 910 MB/s
• Write: Up to 810 MB/s
• Max Random Write 4KB: 120,000 IOPS
• Average Write: 65,000 IOPS

Read more: OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid 1TB PCI-E SSD Review by VR-Zone.com

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The RevoDrive Hybrid comes supplied in a sturdy cardboard box with a bright white/blue theme. The artwork on the packaging is simple and mostly focused on a picture of the device itself.



Inside the box the user will find the drive well packed and secured inside a second, hard cardboard box. The RevoDrive Hybrid is wrapped inside an antistatic bag and surrounded by an ample amount of Polystyrene foam. Given the drive’s weight and size, it would be next to impossible for anyone to cause any damage during shipping. Few items besides the drive itself can be found inside the box, namely just the necessary software CD and a large case sticker.

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Size wise, the RevoDrive Hybrid is nearly identical to the RevoDrive 3 X2 PCI-E drive which we examined several weeks ago. The obvious difference is that the top PCB of the device is now home to a 1TB 2.5” mechanical drive instead of MLC NAND flash memory chips. The drive is a standard 5400RPM notebook drive supplied by Toshiba. Beneath the small heatsink, which unfortunately was glued on the chip, lies the VCA 2.0 flash virtualization layer, a proprietary PCI-E to SAS controller developed by OCZ. The VCA 2.0 supports TRIM, SMART, native command queuing (NCQ), tagged command queuing (TCQ) and several wear management/leveling options.



At the top side of the device one can see several NAND flash memory chips but, more interestingly, the top side is also home to a sticker which has the Dataplex software license key. The Dataplex software is necessary for this drive to work properly.



Although OCZ rebranded the NAND flash memory chips, we can easily tell that they are asynchronous type memory chips. No RevoDrive is currently using synchronous NAND flash memory, not even the premium RevoDrive 3 X2, plus these are the same chips we found inside the Agility 3 drive.



On the RevoDrive Hybrid we found two Sandforce SF-2281 controllers, which the VCA 2.0 binds together as two 64GB drives paired in RAID 0 configuration.

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Hardware:

• Intel Core i5-2500K @ 4.8GHz
• Be Quiet Dark Rock Pro C1 CPU cooler
• Gigabyte Z68AP-D3
• 4GB DDR3 RAM @ 1600MHz
• AMD Radeon HD5670
• OCZ Nocti 64GB mSATA
• OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB + OCZ Synapse 64GB (Dataplex Software)
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB + OCZ Nocti mSATA 64GB (Intel Smart Response)
• OCZ Agility 3 240GB
• OCZ Octane 512GB

Software:

• Microsoft® Windows 7 Ultimate x64 SP1
• CrystalMark 3.0 x64
• IOMeter
• Mathworks Matlab
• Autodesk AutoCAD 2012

To ensure the repeatability of the drive’s performance and verify our results, after the initial run which initiated caching each benchmark was repeated three times and the median result is being displayed in this review.

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In this real world test we are recording the time taken for our OS to fully boot from when we press the power on button, as well as the start up times of two very popular and heavy professional applications, the Autodesk AutoCAD 2012 and the Mathworks Matlab. These tests present excellent examples of how an actual system would start and work under real-life circumstances.



During the initial run caching solutions offer little to no performance advantage. Since no data is cached yet, the system will have to rely on the speed of the HDD almost completely. The second run however tells a different story, with the RevoDrive Hybrid easily catching up and even outperforming popular stand-alone SSD drives. The RevoDrive Hybrid is also notably faster than the other two caching solutions, obviously an advantage of the considerably faster and twice as large SSD cache.

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Crystal Disk Mark 3.0 x64 is a simple but popular synthetic benchmark used to measure the maximum theoretical speed of hard disk and solid state drives.



The 0x00 fill mode (compressible) mode of the test is useful for determining the maximum attainable speed of a drive under ideal circumstances. After the initial run, during which the drive will cache the data inside the SSD, the RevoDrive Hybrid reached breathtaking speeds of 960MB/s read and 776.2MB/s write; that means that the SSD cache of the RevoDrive Hybrid is about twice as fast as a high-end standalone SSD. These speeds drop down to 700MB/s read and 503MB/s write while running the standard test, which is an expected performance drop for a drive which is using asynchronous NAND flash memory.

The standard run of this test reveals another interesting fact. The speed of the first run when using other caching solutions is hardly any faster than running the test with the HDD alone, which speed explodes during the second run since the data has been cached inside the SSD. However, that is not the case with the RevoDrive Hybrid which managed to deliver high performance during the first run as well. It seems that, unlike other solutions, the RevoDrive Hybrid is making use of the SSD cache even if the data has not been fully transferred into the mechanical drive.

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IOMeter is an open source synthetic benchmarking tool which is an I/O subsystem measurement and characterization tool for single and clustered systems, originally developed by Intel Corporation who ultimately discontinued their work on the software which today is a free and open source application.



Sandforce controller based SSD drives perform extremely well in this test and the RevoDrive Hybrid is no exception. With the test relying completely on the speed of the SSD cache itself as all data is being cached, the speedy SSD of the RevoDrive Hybrid allows it to easily outperform stand-alone SSDs and even reach over 110000 I/Os under ideal conditions, a figure higher than even the RevoDrive X2 PCI-E SSD.

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While SSD caching drastically improves performance, one needs to remember that this performance boost is neither consistent nor permanent. Depending on the size of the cache and the amount of disk drive activity, data will certainly be evicted from the cache at some point. In order to test the performance consistency of the system we re-run our initial startup time tests after we got through all of the benchmarks, plus two runs of the PC Mark 7 HDD test, starting 2 intensive applications (COMSOL Multiphysics, ANSYS) and 3 games (TES V: Skyrim, The Witcher 2 and Dragon age 2).

Run 1 - Initial Run

Run 2 - 1st Cached Run

Run 3 - Run after heavy disk usage

Run 4 - 2nd Cached Run



Obviously, after heavy HDD usage and while the software is not “trained” to know which applications are being used more frequently than others, the system’s performance will decrease. The large SSD cache of the RevoDrive Hybrid however allows the drive to retain its performance even after heavy use, displaying much better long-term consistency than smaller (and slower) caching solutions.

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For the stand-alone SSD drive solutions, we perform our power consumption test by installing two digital USB multimeters working as ammeters on the +5V and +12V power lines connected to the drives, checking their current drain at idle and while stressed. Since this method is unfeasible for PCI-E and mSATA drives which are connected directly to the motherboard, we monitor the power consumption of the entire system with and without the drives installed, taking into account the PSU efficiency and power factor.



The energy consumption of the RevoDrive Hybrid 1TB drive is obviously much higher than that of a single SSD, since the device is making use of a mechanical drive and the PCI-E card clearly requires considerably more power than a typical 2.5” SSD with a single controller. Nonetheless, the small 2.5” drive consumes considerably less energy than our 3.5” drive and therefore the energy consumption remains slightly lower than that of a SSD+HDD solution.

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Assessing the technologies and products readily available at the time of this review, the RevoDrive Hybrid appears to be the perfect marriage of a mechanical HDD drive with a large SSD cache. The RevoDrive Hybrid eliminates the limitations currently imposed by other caching solutions, such as the maximum cache size restrictions imposed by the Intel Smart Response technology and the maximum SATA bus bandwidth which bottlenecks the performance of 2.5” SSD drives. Casual users and gamers who frequently use the same applications and repeat similar tasks will love the RevoDrive Hybrid, which is very likely to offer performance higher than a stand-alone SSD while executing everyday tasks.

The RevoDrive Hybrid has been designed to replace a system’s primary drive and OCZ is very strict about that. Unfortunately this device will not work properly as a secondary/storage drive which, alongside with the PCI-E interface, entirely negates the possibility of forming RAID arrays. It also would not work with a smaller HDD if we replaced the main 1TB disk. End users should only purchase a RevoDrive Hybrid only if they are planning to use it as a stand-alone primary system drive.

Setting up the RevoDrive Hybrid is not difficult, yet it is a time consuming process which will last at least a couple of hours because a fresh OS re-installation is required. The obligatory fresh OS installation is likely to deter a few users, mostly professionals, who would purchase the RevoDrive Hybrid as an upgrade for their current system, yet it should not be a problem for those building new high performance systems or for users who simply do not mind performing a fresh OS installation.

Reliability is a major cause of concern when caching solutions are being used, since an abrupt system halt (e.g. power loss, system crash, etc.) could easily corrupt vital data. In order to assess the probability of data loss due to system errors or power outage, we repeatedly tried to cause data corruption by forcing the system to crash or abruptly shut down. After several hours of testing we simply failed to cause any data corruption or any other problems, aside from a long waiting period of over 20 minutes every time we forcefully shut down the system.

The RevoDrive Hybrid 1TB drive can be currently found retailing for about 330$ USD (420$ SGD) at the time of this review, a price only slightly higher than that of a high performance 120GB SSD plus a typical 1TB 2.5” drive and less than half the cost of a 512GB SATA SSD. We certainly cannot claim that the RevoDrive Hybrid is a cheap storage device, yet it undoubtedly offers an exceptional combination of speed and size for casual and professional users who require a high performance primary drive combined with abundant storage capacity.