OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid PCI Express SSD Review

Name: OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid
Brand: OCZ

by Marco Chiappetta — Monday, October 24, 2011, 09:30 AM EDT

Test System and ATTO Disk Benchmark

Our Test Methodologies: Under each test condition, the drives tested here were installed as secondary volumes in our testbed, with a standard spinning hard disk for the OS and benchmark installations, with the exception being the OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid, which must be the boot volume to function properly. Our testbed's motherboard was updated with the latest BIOS available as of press time and AHCI mode was enabled. Windows firewall, automatic updates and screen savers were all disabled before testing. In all test runs, we rebooted the system and waited several minutes for drive activity to settle before invoking a test.

HotHardware Test System

Intel Core i7 and SSD Powered

Processor -

Motherboard -

Video Card -

Memory -

Audio -

Hard Drives -

Hardware Used:
Intel Core i7-2600K

Asus P8Z6-V Pro
(Z68 Chipset, AHCI Enabled)

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285

4GB Kingston DDR3-1600

Integrated on board

WD Raptor 150GB (OS Drive)
OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid (1TB)
OCZ Vertex 3 MaxIOPs (240GB)
Seagate Momentux XT (500GB)
Intel 311 SSD w/ Rator (SRT)

OS -
Chipset Drivers -
DirectX -

Video Drivers -

Relevant Software:
Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 x64
Intel 9.2.0.1030, iRST 10.5.1027
DirectX 11

NVIDIA GeForce 275.33

Benchmarks Used:
ATTO v2.47
CrystalDiskMark v3.01 x64
PCMark Vantage

ATTO Disk Benchmark

More Information Here: http://bit.ly/btuV6w

ATTO is a quick disk benchmark that measures transfer speeds across a specific volume length. It measures raw transfer rates for both reads and writes and graphs them out in an easily interpreted chart. We chose .5kb through 8192kb transfer sizes and a queue depth of 6 over a total max volume length of 256MB. ATTO's workloads are sequential in nature and measure raw bandwidth, rather than I/O response time, access latency, etc. This test was performed on blank, formatted drives with default NTFS partitions in Windows 7 x64.

In all of our graphs moving forward, you're going to see three entries for the OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid, 1) where only the RevoDrive Hybrid's hard drive was tested, 2) the results from the first run of the benchmark after enabling the SSD cache, and 3) results from the third run of the benchmark with caching enabled. Our intent is to show the worst case performance scenario (HD alone) and best case performance (third run, SSD cache utilized). We compare the RevoDrive Hybrid to a Momentus XT, which is another hybrid solution, as well as a standalone SSD.

The ATTO disk benchmark clearly shows the advantage of RevoDrive Hybrid's SSD cache. The HD tests end up somewhat below the Momentus XT, but once the RevoDrive Hybrid's cache is enabled, transfers go through the roof. The Revo Hybrid managed write speeds in excess of 800MB/s and reads of just over 1GB/s, which crush the standalone SSD.