OCZ's SSD caching solution launches by VR-Zone.com

It's hard not to call OCZ an innovative company as they keep coming up with new ways of either connecting your SSD or take advantage of SSD technology somehow in your PC. The latest addition to the RevoDrive series of PCI Express based SSDs is the RevoDrive Hybrid and if you've been around for a while, you might remember that once upon a time ISA cards with a hard drive strapped to them weren't so uncommon and the RevoDrive Hybrid somewhat harkens back to those days.

Although the Hardcards as they were known as, are long since history it looks like we'll once again shove hard drives into our expansion slots, at least if OCZ has anything to do with it. Early details from the Flash Memory Summit last year suggested that OCZ was working on a hard drive caching solution using a RevoDrive with a pair of SATA connectors on it, but apparently this idea was scrapped in favour of the RevoDrive Hybrid.



OCZ demoed an early version of the RevoDrive Hybrid back at Computex, but quite a few things have changed since then. Ok, so OCZ is a couple of months later than it planned, but these things happen and there are some upsides and downsides to this. For starters larger 2.5-inch hard drives have become widely available and the RevoDrive Hybrid will now ship with a 1TB drive rather than a 500GB drive. The SSD part has also been boosted from 60 to 100GB which should hopefully mean improved performance and OCZ is claiming speeds of up to 910MB/s in the press release alongside 120,000 IOPS at 4K random writes, all very impressive numbers indeed.

The not so good news is that the price also went up, from an estimated US$350 to US$499.99 making the RevoDrive Hybrid a very costly SSD caching solution. This clearly puts it outside of your average consumers reach as well, but hopefully OCZ will consider launching more affordable options in the future.

Source: OCZ