OCZ Announces SandForce Based PCIe RevoDrive SSD

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• softdrinkviking - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - link

  also, i think you can't use it to boot from,
  or at least PCIe SSDs couldn't do that the last time i checked.

• Per Hansson - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - link

  There is a 32pin EEPROM in the upper left of the card, so it is most likely bootable
  
  Also right above both of the SandForce controller sits a quite large rectangular white thing maked "X1 and X2" on the PCB, I'll take a guess those are x-caps
  
  And lastly there are many unpopulated headers on the board, for example J3 and J5 between the SandForce controllers, can most likely be used for diagnostics and firmware flashing (disaster recovery)
  There are also many contacts points named "TP" this is most likely a development board with extra stuff for diagnostics
  
  The firmware is probably flashed to the card via the PCIe bridge of course, like you do with any other RAID controller
  
  And the big connector in the middle with 4 holes surrounding it is most likely for capacity expansion via a daugtherboard

• e_sandrs - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - link

  I think there is confusion between PCI and PCIe going on. Old PCI shared a single bus for all traffic, PCIe has dedicated lanes for each slot back to the southbridge (or such).
  
  Also, "raw" PCIe SSDs cannot be booted, but this SSD and any other with RAID functionality can be a boot device -- it's just a RAID card as far as the system is concerned, it doesn't care what is beyond the Intel RAID controller.

• DesktopMan - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - link

  There are a whole lot more pci express lanes on some controllers than most people need though. Even graphics cards only lose a small percentage of performance running at 8x 2.0 instead of 16x 2.0 so even if you used some of those lanes (iirc you have to go from 16 to 8) it would be fine.
  
  Yes, I ment what I said about Sata II. If the current gen SSDs are bandwidth limited the actual performance (at least read performance) of SF1200 might be higher than we are currently seeing, this this card having a potantial to be faster than 2x of current SSDs.
  
  As for trim, I'm not sure there even is such a thing as trim for pci express devices. Without looking into the driver model of these cards I see no reason for the driver not to allow trim messages to pass down though, by telling the OS that yes, this is a drive that supports trim. After all, this is not a software raid device that is detected as two drives in the OS so the problems with raid 0 with two SSDs don't really apply here. Just issues with trim + pci express in general.

• bwj - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - link

  TRIM, obviously, is a feature of SATA. If this thing doesn't look like a SATA disk then TRIM is beside the point.

• Simen1 - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - link

  How can they possibly reduce the price of a drive with 80-90% by adding a Raid chip?
  
  Does Anand mean 10-20% _MORE_ then a single drive?

• overzealot - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - link

  Either it's been updated, or that's exactly what he said.

• Ninjahedge - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - link

  The way the screw holes are mounted behind the center port there it looks like it is designed to hold something heavy and mounted towards that end. Expansion sounds right, but it may be a diagnostic port as well.
  
  Who knows if this will stay when it comes to popular distribution or if this was the tinker-toy of the developers......

• Out of Box Experience - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - link

  
  If the daughter card has 2 additional SSD's and a supercap to prevent data loss during power outage, then the ability to plug 4 such cards into my motherboard would make an excellent boot drive with read speeds around 4.4 GB/sec in Raid (16 SSD's X 275 MB/sec read per SSD average)
  
  So far so good! If I am then booting up in, for example 0.63 seconds but want to shave a few more milliseconds from my boot time, I don't think I can push the buttons on my stopwatch fast enough to verify if my Boot Tweeks are working or not
  
  Serious Gamers really need to be ready to play by the time they release the power button on their computer after all
  
  Wink Wink
  
  I just hope Intel has a 16 core CPU to handle the overhead by the time I can afford these and 2 Dual GPU Fermi Cards

• newrigel - Saturday, June 19, 2010 - link

  When are these coming to the US?