OCZ RevoDrive X2 Review: Killer SSD Performance

We really like PCMark Vantage's HDD Performance for its real-world application measurement approach to testing.  From simple Windows start-up performance to data streaming from a disk drive in a game engine and video editing with Windows Movie Maker, we feel more comfortable that these tests reasonably illustrate the performance profile of SSDs in an end-user/consumer PC usage model.

This series of Vantage tests will stress read performance in real-world usage models, with a broad mix of sequential and random read transactions of both small and large file sizes. 

Futuremark's PCMark Vantage http://www.futuremark.com

Here, the OCZ RevoDrive X2 dishes out the second fastest set of numbers in the bunch, second only, by relatively small margins, to the ioXtreme 80GB card.  The beauty of the RevoDrive X2 however, especially with tests like the Vista Startup test, is that you can actually boot off of it as a primary OS volume, which is something we still simply cannot say for Fusion-io's product, though they've promised this capability eventually (at this point, we'll believe that when we see it).  Regardless, the rest of the data speaks for itself.  The RevoDrive X2 is over twice as fast as a standard SandForce-based SATA SSD in many of these tests and 20 - 35% faster in these tests versus even the proprietary OCZ IBIS drive.

Incidentally, we setup the RevoDrive X2 with a clean Windows 7 Ultimate X64 install and set it to boot, just to have a little fun.  The RevoDrive X2 booted windows in 13.5 seconds; good times, good times.