Verdict and Conclusion
Here we are at the bottom line, or at least the bottom page. The OCZ RevoDrive 3 X2 laid down some truly spectacular numbers in ATTO and some respectable scores in other benches.
The price is not low, you’re looking at between $601 and $660 for the drive depending on where you buy it. Now if you compare that to the RevoDrive 3 120GB we reviewed the price is 50% higher for 50% faster performance and twice the capacity. The value front is looking rather better. It’s still a fair amount of money per GB, but given the performance I would call it a decent value.
Performance wise it did well in most benches, even the ones that RevoDrives in general don’t score as well in as normal SATA drives.
Drivers need to be loaded into the windows installer to install windows on the RevoDrive 3, it’s annoying if you didn’t remember to put them on a thumbdrive first, though you can eject the windows DVD and put the driver disk in, then switch back afterwards. Installing a 64bit driver on installation is not possible, though the 32bit works fine for installing 64bit windows.
In ATTO it absolutely stomps, with a queue depth of 10 it is insane, while at the default value of 4 it is merely staggeringly incredibly fast. I read the spec, I knew it would be fast, but wow.
The PCIe nature of the drive is either a plus or a minus, depending on how many SATA6 ports you have and how many PCIe slots you have. Many motherboards have spare PCIe slots and limited SATA6 ports. Almost the entire SandyBridge motherboard lineup falls into that category really. If you Don’t have a spare PCIe slot you’re going to have a rather hard time using the RevoDrive! The speeds can be approached by two or three high end drives like Vertex 3 MaxIOPS, but that eats up SATA6 ports right quick or requires a PCIe RAID card.
A pair of Vertex 3 120GB MaxIOPS drives can reach similar speed test results in AS SSD and CDM, but nowhere near the ATTO results. ATTO does a good job of showing the maximum throughput in high load situations, and I don’t think anything short of a dedicated PCIe RAID card loaded with high end drives is going to touch the RevoDrive 3 X2 240GB. Plus if you go the RAID route you lose TRIM and some other monitoring type commands.
The RevoDrive 3 X2 240GB supports TRIM commands as well as other SCSI commands, plus the drive is bootable of course!
It really does use very little CPU power, even when used with a very old and slow CPU.
All told there are pros:
- Fast. Like, really, really, really fast.
- Doesn’t eat a bunch of SATA ports.
- Did I mention it’s fast?
- Supports SMART data gathering, TRIM, as well as a stack of SCSI commands.
- Being a SSD, it is 100% totally silent.
As with everything I have run into in my life, there are cons too:
- Performance comes at a price. $600 in this case.
- Drivers exist only for Windows 7.
All told the raw, brutal, almost excessive speeds registered in ATTO’s simulation of a heavy workload combined with the low CPU power performance (and helping me grab a gold cup…) outweigh the price tag and lack of drivers for anything other than Windows 7, and I feel that a rating of 9.1/10 is well deserved.
SCORE
9.1/10
