OCZ RevoDrive 50GB SSD

Test Setup

• In Win Ironclad Case
• MSI Big Bang XPOWER Motherboard
• Intel Core i7-920
• Thermaltake Frio CPU Cooler
• ATI Radeon 4870×2
• Palit Radeon 4870 Sonic Dual Edition
• Ultra X4 1050 Watt Power Supply
• Windows 7 x64

All of the benchmarks were run using the MSI Big Bang XPOWER motherboard with BIOS revision 1.4. This was the latest BIOS update as of writing, and added support for OCZ PCI-E SSD cards.

Datamarck

Datamarck is a program that details a drive’s read speed over time and displays it in a nice line graph.

We can see that the name of the drive is “SiImage – RAID.” OCZ makes no effort to hide what’s going on under the hood with the drive, and why should they? The SiImage branding further shows that the drive is using a Silicon Image 3124 RAID controller to make the awesome on-board SandForce drives work in tandem.

The results are a different story. The score of 151.6 MB/s is waaaaay off base from what we would expect from this test, and is probably indicative of some kind of incompatibility between this benchmark and the drive. The access time is impressive at 0.4 ms, but still higher than what we would expect from an SSD.

HDTune

HDTune is a favorite benchmark of ours for gauging the performance of hard drives. It offers a wide variety of benchmarks and information about the drive you’re testing.

	Read	Write

The most common benchmarks run with HDTune are the standard Read and Write tests that test the entire surface of the drive and give an average performance score in MB/s. We can see that the average read speed is 262 MB/s. This still falls short of advertised read speed of 540 MB/s by quite a bit. The resulting read speed is approximately half of what it is advertised that it should be. This is probably because of the nature of the data that is being fed to the drive. If the data blocks are very small, they won’t be divided effectively across the RAID 0 stripe, and you won’t see the full benefit of the two drives working together. As we will see in some of the other benchmarks, a read speed close to the advertised speed is obtainable.

The write speed weighs in with a very impressive 249.2 MB/s. This still falls short of the advertised write speed of 450 MB/s, but is instead fairly close to the advertised sustained write speed of 350 MB/s. The discrepancy in results is again for the same reason as the read speed being off from the expected results.

	File Benchmark

The File Benchmark is used to determine the performance of a drive after it has been formatted and is ready to be used for day to day activities. This benchmark is much closer to what you can expect from real world use. We see that as the drive is given larger sequential files to read and write, the performance goes up exponentially. We see the drive peaking out with a sustained read speed of slightly over 500 MB/s. That is a phenomenal read speed for a single drive. The sustained write speed is just as impressive, scoring in at just shy of 425 MB/s. This is much closer to the advertised benchmarks. It’s good to see OCZ wasn’t lying to their customers.

	Random Read	Random Write

The Random Read/Write benchmark of HDTune generates a load that would be consistent with running an operating system on the drive. The results are measured in IOPS, which are used to gauge the throughput of a drive, and in MB/s. The RevoDrive scores a very impressive read speed of 404.037 MB/s for random reads and 17.061 MB/s for 4KB reads (this is about the same performance as a single SandForce drive for 4KB reads). The reason for the lower 4KB read speeds has to do with the queue depth that HDTune uses to test the drive. With a larger queue depth (which simulates a more intense workload) the 4KB read speeds are much more impressive. The smaller queue depth also affects the 4KB write speeds. The random write speed for the RevoDrive is 328.239 MB/s, which is very impressive. The 4KB write speed is 74.649 MB/s.

  Previous Page         1. Introduction2. A Closer Look and Compatibility3. Test Setup, Datamarck, and HDTune4. ATTO and SiSoft Sandra5. PCMark Vantage and CrystalDiskMark6. No TRIM Support and Conclusion7. View All         Next Page