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TEST SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
If you remember a comment I made at the beginning of this report, I have not been a fan of disk caching as I have yet to see any performance gain worth addressing…at least up until today. Having tested the OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid myself, I have been able to provide first hand results that the Hybrid, not only caches the hard drive, but does it quickly and very effectively. I am sold.
The Revo Hybrid is available right now at a price of $499.99 at many retailers. Some might believe this to be a leap but, as we have shown, this SSD is comprised of the Revo 3 PCIe SSD (priced separately at $399.99) and the Toshiba 1TB HDD2K51 5400RPM hard drive (priced separately at $99.99). The price point matches that of its hardware already on the market with the only deviation being that our Revo 3 has enterprise standard 28% over provisioning whereas the consumer available version is advertised with 7% as a 120GB storage device. As much of a bonus as this seems, it really isn’t as utilizing an SSD as a caching device will result in the total writes to the device occurring quicker which the over provisioning makes up for.
At the end of the day, the OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid 1TB PCIe SSD has answered the consumers call for SSD speed, HDD capacity and at a price that doesn’t break the bank. Things that might be improved upon would naturally include creating a BIOS that would allow the swapping of hard drives on the card itself and maybe even a higher caliber hard drive. Truth be told, I did unsuccessfully attach a Crucial M4 just to see what might result as I couldn’t help but think that it was a question worth exploring.
For now though…time to have some fun putting her together once again though. I have no doubt that the Hybrids end performance, as good as it was, played effect to my preliminary poking, prodding and testing of the SSD and hard drive separately. OCZ is more than welcome to switch this off with another and we would definitely publish any improvement between the two tests.
I would whole heartedly recommend the Hybrid to the exact community that has been in search of both performance and capacity in a single storage device for some time now. This is a ‘Must Have’ For those wanting speed, capacity and value!
Great review, as always! You always provide useful insights and detailed analysis.
Thank you very much!
It’s a nice concept, but I’d like to see it implemented in a bit more down-to-earth way: SSD with half the capacity, and a single-platter HDD (all to reduce material costs and energy consumption) would be perfect for me. It doesn’t always have to be the super-duper fastest and largest drive 😉
Can you clarify the TRIM support issue? I thought Windows 7 supports TRIM if it is enabled correctly.
Windows 7 supports TRIM but not in RAID or SCSI environments, the latter of which is used by the new Revo 3 drives.
“OCZ says the Revo 3×2 Card supports TRIM because the architecture is based on SCSI. The MS Windows Storport architecture, however, does not presently support TRIM or SCSI UNMAP. Conversations with OCZ regarding this revealed that OCZ and Microsoft are working together and the functionality should be enabled in the near future.” from:
https://www.thessdreview.com/our-reviews/ocz-revodrive-3-x2-480-gb-pcie-ssd-review-physical-characteristics-and-vca-technology/
Are you sure the memory is IMFT?? According to the IMFT website (link below), 100% of the IMFT NAND output is consumed by Intel and Micron.
https://www.imftech.com/company/faqs.html#customers
That is not correct. We have documented two separate ocasions where IMFT NAND flash memory was utilized in SSDs and the name of the flash made to reflect that of the company, the previous being SuperTalent.
That is not correct. We have documented two separate ocasions where IMFT NAND flash memory was utilized in SSDs and the name of the flash made to reflect that of the company, the previous being SuperTalent.Type your reply…
So, does it work on Linux and how well? That might be a much more important issue than Windows support – these SSDs are the best thing of the last decade for speeding up databases and other server operations!
Team up with Phoronix if you are lacking Linux expertise 😉
Great review, no complaints there. My spelling/grammar side was going crazy with your “their / there / they’re” misspellings, though! Might want to look up when to use each correctly.
Errors discovered amended and saved. Thank you very much!
You have a valid point as we do not utilize Linux at all but will look into it. No promises…
Great article, very in depth. Thanks. You may made me re-consider my 2nd SSD purchase.
FYI, page 5, first paragraph, 100MB/typo/100GB.
Glad to help…and TX!
can you dual boot ie linux/win7
On a new install, how do we download revo hybrid drivers and store to a folder without windows yet loaded?
You first download the drivers to a USB. During the Windows installation, it will come to a point where you need to insert the USB and select the drivers.
I liked your review and would very much like to employ this in my system. I have a z800 I tried to install this card but it would not function. I could see it but could not access the drive. My 135gb sas drives were stripped and very fast but I needed more drive space but didn’t want to take a hair cut on speed. Any suggestions on how I might get this to function? I tried ocz, that was disappointing as they were of no assistance. thanks