OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid 1TB PCIe SSD Review – Performance, Capacity And Value Finally

OCZ REVODRIVE 3 MOTHERBOARD PERFORMANCE

In examining the Revo 3 (which it is when separated from the daughter board), we need to understand that performance may differ from that of the retail 120GB Revo 3 available for consumer purchase.  To start, this drive is over provisioned to 28% whereas the commercially available drive is over provisioned at 7%.  This explains why the advertised drive is listed at 120GB, whereas, this only shows 100GB as being available before formatting.

Performance may also differ as we are well aware that the bios is different (wait for it) as well as the hybrids firmware. We also don’t need to repeat testing as we will be for the Hybrid tests as there is no ‘caching’ in this scenario.

ATTO DISK BENCHMARK VER. 2.46

ATTO Disk Benchmark is perhaps one of the oldest benchmarks going and is definitely the main staple for manufacturer performance specifications. ATTO uses RAW or compressible data and, for our benchmarks, we use a set length of 256mb and test both the read and write performance of various transfer sizes ranging from 0.5 to 8192kb. Manufacturers prefer this method of testing as it deals with raw (compressible) data rather than random (includes incompressible data) which, although more realistic, results in lower performance results.

CRYSTAL DISK BENCHMARK VER. 3.0 X64

Crystal Disk Benchmark is used to measure read and write performance through sampling of raw (0/1 Fill/compressible) or random data which is, for the most part, incompressible. Many new SandForce Driven SSD owners who cant wait to test the performance of their SSD often grab this program and run a quick test, not realizing that they are testing with incompressible data rather than compressible data used in testing by manufacturers.  Our test with CDM will be with ‘ofill’ or easily compressible data whereas we will rely on AS SSD for incompressible data testing below.

AS SSD BENCHMARK VER 1.64

Up until recently, ATTO was the only benchmark created specifically for SSD testing and it uses incompressible data.  AS SSD, for the most part, gives us the worst case scenario in SSD transfer speeds because of its use of incompressible data and many enthusiasts like to AS SSD for their needs.

We can see that the performance highs of 774MB/s and 610MB/s are not quite as high as the RevoDrive 3 or RevoDrive 3 Hybrid but still great scores.  Also, a quick look at the sequential performance results of AS SSD confirms the use of asynchronous NAND flash memory in the SSD as synchronous would have provided much better results in testing incompressible data.  Stay tuned for PCMark Vantage results of the ‘Cache’ SSD which will  displayed and discussed later in our report.