OCZ Announces SandForce Based PCIe RevoDrive SSD
by Anand Lal Shimpi on May 31, 2010 10:33 AM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
- Storage
- SSDs
- OCZ
- Computex 2010
- RevoDrive
PCIe based SSDs have been reserved for enterprise use ever since their introduction. Generally limited by pricing, even OCZ's own forays into the PCIe SSD market have been targeted at enterprise customers. That may all change with today's announcement. Meet the RevoDrive:
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This PCIe x4 card takes a pair of SF-1200 controllers and RAIDs them together, giving you roughly the performance of two SF-1200 SSDs but on a single card. Through some unique component selection OCZ aims to keep costs around 10 - 20% more than a single drive. Obviously you lose TRIM support and the overall performance should be no different than a pair of SF-1200s in RAID (on a good controller/chipset), but if you need PCIe this may be an option.
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leexgx - Monday, May 31, 2010 - link
whats more likely its for is so an second bank of flash as there is 4 screw holes there to hold an second bank of flash, making it into an 4x raid card for flash the slot most likely is connected to the intel raid chipSlash3 - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - link
Countdown to the RevoDrive Pro, now with double the capacity and performance!Mr Perfect - Monday, May 31, 2010 - link
What is it all the cool kids are saying nowadays? Oh, right. U MAD BRO?DesktopMan - Monday, May 31, 2010 - link
Where are these speed estimates from? SF1200 could very well be limited by SATA 3gbps, so two of them in raid 0 might give you better than 2x the performance of a single controller in current SSDs.They could implement trim as a OS driver if they wanted to. No idea if they do.
yyrkoon - Monday, May 31, 2010 - link
I think you're a bit confused.ekv - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - link
DesktopMan, you appear to be confusing SATA with PCIe. PCIe 4x ought to yield, correct me if I'm wrong, 2GB/s bandwidth. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCIe]One thing in the article that bugs me is "Obviously you lose TRIM support". I assume RAID 0 is responsible for this, but why? Are all SSD RAID drives incapable of TRIM? Is there a work-around?
DEVAST8 - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - link
TRIM is still NOT possible with SSD's in RAID. Garbage Collection would be the alternative but I do not believe garbage collection works with the Sandforce controllers.bwj - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - link
No garbage collection? I don't know where you people get these ideas. ALL SSDs have garbage collection, otherwise it would NOT BE POSSIBLE to have an SSD without the TRIM command.beginner99 - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - link
No I think he might be right. SATA-II only has about 300 Mbyte/s compared to 2 GB/s for pcie x4 if wiki is correct on this. Therefore if SF-1200 is limited by SATA-II, this drive could be more than twice as fast.Let's assume 1 SF-1200 could read at 400 Mbyte/s. On SATA-II this will be something close to 300 minus overhead. (which it is)
On pice x4 it's not bandwith limited so you could get 800 Mbyte/s. hypothetical.
Are there any downsides to pice drives? (beside losing trim in this one)
xeopherith - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - link
The downside would be that your using your PCIe Bus :)If you already have other things like maybe two graphics cards in Crossfire or even just one graphics card, you don't want to max out your bus.
Ultimately I think it would be fine but just keep in mind that for example your PCI bus only has 133mb/s transfer rate no matter how many PCI SATA controllers you install into it. They all share that bus.