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Our review sample arrived hot from the production line and the box art is dramatic, highlighting the unusual shape of the device on the front.
The outer shell of the packaging slides away to reveal the inner box. The company logo and product name are all that is printed here. Nothing more dramatic than black and white however.
The user manual is the only ‘extra' in the box. It is well written and easy to follow, which is just as well as setting the device up is a little more complex than normal. We will detail the installation procedure on the next page.
The RevoDrive Hybrid is an unusual looking beast and is basically a PCI E based SSD unit with a 2.5 inch hard drive slotted into the upper layer. It measures 167.64 x 98.42 x 22.15 mm (without the bracket) and it weighs 289g.
OCZ have placed their own sticker over the top of the hard drive, but we can see underneath that it is a 1TB Toshiba 5,400 rpm unit. The card is PCI Express Gen 2 x4. OCZ rate the MTBF at 600,000 hours.
The intelligent caching software manages both the solid state memory and the mechanical drive, meaning that optimum performance will be gained after using the device for a while. The algorithms adapt to the users system of working, ensuring that the most accessed data is on the SSD drive. OCZ are using a SuperScale Storage Accelerator which uses a unique command queuing structure with balancing algorithms. This leads to higher performance and reduced load on the host processor.
OCZ also use a proprietary Virtualised Controller Architecture. This is the only virtualisation in the industry with full support for TRIM and SCSI unmap. There is 100GB of SSD storage on the PCB to pair up with the 1TB of mechanical storage. OCZ are using 24nm Multi Level Cell (MLC) with a dual Sandforce 2281 controller architecture.
The drive uses ECC recovery and is rated up to 55 bits correctable per 512 byte sector. The encryption is 128 bit and 256 bit AES-compliant. There is self monitoring, analysis and reporting technology (SMART) support onboard.
yay, kudos to OCZ. about time 🙂
Thats really good. Didnt think that would be possible. Is it just for Windows 7 ?
I was wondering when something like this would be released, and it came quicker than I imagined. There will always be a trade off with a mechanical drive in the mix, but they seem to have it narrowed down a good bit.
great stuff. been waiting for something like this. reckon they could make a 2.5 inch drive like this? obviously it would be much thicker in dimensions and not practical for a laptop, but for a desktop? would make a lot of sense. 1TB sata 6GBps drive right at the limits of the platform for about £350?
This is really incredible. 1tb for under £400 at this speed? OCZ really do lead the way in SSD tech.
How do I know if my motherboard can support this? ive read some dont allow for booting.?
Its still a fair bit of cash. are they making a smaller size? 500gb would be great for £200 🙂
lousy drive for money. seagate has similar pci-e drive with 10X performance for same money.
drashek md
thomasxstewart.
what bollocks. 10GB/s read via a 2.5 inch drive and SSD combo for £400? lol.
Nought to do,
I believe that Segate makes a drive in 300GB and 500GB sizes that is a hybrid SSD and mechanical HDD. I’m pretty sure that it even fits into a laptop. Now, I’m not sure about relative performance and they are pretty pricey for what they are but they do exhist.
Now this OCZ drive, that is a nice piece. I would probably use something like this on my media PC for encoding purposes or the like. My RAID setup seems to slow down when running a lot of reads and writes. I bet that this would be substantially better at doing those type of things.