discussion OCZ RevoDrive 350 480GB PCI-E SSD Review

[AkG]

Firefox Performance / Real World Data Transfers

Firefox Portable Offline Performance

<i>Firefox is notorious for being slow on loading tabs in offline mode once the number of pages to be opened grows larger than a dozen or so. We can think of fewer worse case scenarios than having 100 tabs set to reload in offline mode upon Firefox startup, but this is exactly what we have done here.

By having 100 pages open in Firefox portable, setting Firefox to reload the last session upon next session start and then setting it to offline mode, we are able to easily recreate a worse case scenario. Since we are using Firefox portable all files are easily positioned in one location, making it simple to repeat the test as necessary. In order to ensure repetition, before touching the Firefox portable files, we have backed them up into a .rar file and only extracted a copy of it to the test device.</i>

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Real World Data Transfers

<i>No matter how good a synthetic benchmark like IOMeter or PCMark is, it can not really tell you how your hard drive will perform in “real world” situations. All of us here at Hardware Canucks strive to give you the best, most complete picture of a review item’s true capabilities and to this end we will be running timed data transfers to give you a general idea of how its performance relates to real life use. To help replicate worse case scenarios we will transfer a 10.00GB contiguous file and a folder containing 400 subfolders with a total 12,000 files varying in length from 200mb to 100kb (10.00 GB total).

Testing will include transfer to and transferring from the devices, using MS RichCopy and logging the performance of the drive. Here is what we found. </i>

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Once again we have absolutely nothing bad to say about these results. In fact, they do need a bit of explanation. You see, our fastest storage device to date has been the Intel 910 800GB and that is what is used to test real world data transfers…and in one fell swoop the OCZ RevoDrive 350 has saturated its write performance. So much so that for the first time ever an Intel 910 800GB is the bottleneck in this test!

Considering you can get </i>four and a half</i> RevoDrive 350 480GBs for the same amount as <i>one</i> Intel 910 800GB, words actually fail us.

 

[AkG]

Partial and Full Drive Performance

Partial and Full Drive Performance

<i>While it is important to know how a drive will perform under optimal conditions, more realistic scenarios are just as important. Knowing if a solid state drive will behave differently when partially or even nearly full than when it is empty is very important information to know. To quickly and accurately show this crucial information we have first filled the drive to 50% capacity and re-tested using both synthetic and real world tests. After the completion of this we then re-test at 75% and 90% of full capacity. </i>

Synthetic Test Results

<i>For our synthetic testing we have opted for our standard PCMark 7 test.</i>

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Real World Results

<i>For a real world application we have opted for our standard Windows 7 Start Up with Boot Time A/V Scan Performance test.</i>

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While there is significant drop in performance when the RevoDrive is nearly full, the dropoff isn't worrying in any way. Thankfully with four controllers to spread the load these results are much, much better than they could have been and performance retention is excellent.

 

[AkG]

Conclusion

Conclusion

Historically PCI-E SSDs have been a hard sell. Other than their astronomical prices, a strict adherence to the data-only segment of the enterprise market precluded their use in most systems due to their financial and practicality limitations. Recently we’ve seen a shift towards more accessible high speed models due to the current generation of SATA-based SSDs hitting an interface bottleneck which has stymied their expansion into higher performance brackets. OCZ has been leading the charge for a number of years now and the new RevoDrive 350 is the culmination of their experience, distilled down into a drive that is ridiculously fast and easy to work with.

The RevoDrive 350 will never be considered a particularly good value and that should come as no surprise since flagship products rarely are. As a matter of fact, we consider the 480GB version’s $1.73/GB quite a fair proposition considering the insane speeds OCZ has been able to squeeze out of it and its relatively generous capacity. $830 is steep but for anyone who has the money, taking a drink from the performance fire hose becomes intoxicating very quickly and that feeling holds an intrinsic value all by itself. Plus, unlike Intel’s 910-series the RevoDrive 350 is bootable so it can be used as a lightning quick OS drive.

Speaking of throughput, OCZ has designed a drive which thoroughly trounces every other non-enterprise class SSD and even leaves Plextor’s M6e eating dust. We’d even go so far as to say that upcoming SATA Express drives won’t be able to hold a candle to these results. Even comparing a trip of Crucial M550's to the RevoDrive 350 480GB would be an exercise in futility since OCZ’s drive is simply better, faster, and a hell of a lot easier to use. Obviously, if you have the space on your motherboard, the RevoDrive 350 is among the fastest you can buy now and will likely provide upper echelon performance for the next few years.

Other than the stratospheric price, there is one hiccup in an otherwise stellar showing: CPU usage. While OCZ has made huge strides towards lowering the amount of processing cycles the Revo takes when the system is at an idle state, continual does tend to put a relatively large strain on the system as the CPU struggles to process the flood of data being thrown its way. This is more the fault of our test system’s quad core processor rather than and misstep by OCZ. Just remember this if you’re planning to pair up the RevoDrive 350 with anything but an 8-thread or higher CPU.

OCZ’s RevoDrive 350 480GB is everything we could have hoped for and then some. Ethusiasts and workstation users finally have a true PCI-E device which offers bleeding edge performance but doesn’t come with sanity risking asking prices. If your system can handle the flood of performance this SSD offers, it deserve serious consideration.

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