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OCZ 50GB RevoDrive PCI-Express SSD Review
Author: Jim Manis
Published: Monday, March 14, 2011
A Closer Look
OCZs Revo drive comes in a very nice compact unit measuring just 6 1/2 inches long and standard card height. This is a 50GB unit which is the smallest currently offered. Larger capacity units appear to be the same size but depending on capacity come with a second board sandwiched to the main board.
The 50GB unit we are reviewing is half populated meaning only half of the NAND locations are used. Presumably the 100GB unit would be the fully utilized version of the same drive and a 200GB unit possible with the same NAND chips on the second board. A modular design like this is very well laid out and probably is the reason the drives can be brought to market for a reasonable price.
The 50GB unit we are reviewing is half populated meaning only half of the NAND locations are used. Presumably the 100GB unit would be the fully utilized version of the same drive and a 200GB unit possible with the same NAND chips on the second board. A modular design like this is very well laid out and probably is the reason the drives can be brought to market for a reasonable price.
The Sand Force 1222 controllers are likely to get the attention on these cards as Sand Force has really shown its talent in the SSD market. All of that speed wouldn't be possible without the help of the rest of the components including a Silicon Image 3124 RAID controller and a Pericom PCI-E bridge chip..
Installation
On the test rig we used a x16 slot which is electrically wired for x4 lanes. This is a common configuration on most motherboards to provide flexibility the newer generations such as the Sandy Bridge model we used for this review.
Installation was extremely easy, install the card and unplug your boot drive. The system booted up and showed the Revo drive and assigned it as the primary boot device. We found this reassuring since several "reviews" on newegg and around the web seemed to imply there were conflicts with certain Asus motherboards. Attempting to debunk these we also tested the Revo in both a Rampage 3 Extreme and EVGA X58 SLI LE. In both cases the board booted immediately and picked up the Revo as a bootable device.
One weird quirk worth mentioning, After installing windows and our full benchmarking suite we started testing and noticed that the drive seemed slow and benches were maxing out at 200 - 220 MB/s. Figuring something was wrong we went into bios and noticed that the PCI-E lane had auto defaulted to a x1 instead of the expected x4. After forcing the full lane bandwidth the numbers jumped up to the ones you see in this review.
The lesson here is that if anyone is experiencing slow performance check your motherboard configuration..
Installation was extremely easy, install the card and unplug your boot drive. The system booted up and showed the Revo drive and assigned it as the primary boot device. We found this reassuring since several "reviews" on newegg and around the web seemed to imply there were conflicts with certain Asus motherboards. Attempting to debunk these we also tested the Revo in both a Rampage 3 Extreme and EVGA X58 SLI LE. In both cases the board booted immediately and picked up the Revo as a bootable device.
One weird quirk worth mentioning, After installing windows and our full benchmarking suite we started testing and noticed that the drive seemed slow and benches were maxing out at 200 - 220 MB/s. Figuring something was wrong we went into bios and noticed that the PCI-E lane had auto defaulted to a x1 instead of the expected x4. After forcing the full lane bandwidth the numbers jumped up to the ones you see in this review.
The lesson here is that if anyone is experiencing slow performance check your motherboard configuration..
