OCZ RevoDrive 400 NVMe SSD Rips Through CES 2016 At 2.7GB Per Second

Solid State Drive technology continues to make big strides in performance, reliability and cost. And of course, at CES 2016 there were a number of storage manufacturers on hand showing off their latest grear, though none made quite the splash that Toshiba's OCZ Technology group made with the annoucement of their new RevoDrive 400 NVMe PCI Express SSD. With this new drive, OCZ is tapping on Toshiba's NVMe controller technology to deliver serious bandwidth in this consumer-targeted M.2 gumstick style drive that also comes with a X4 PCI Express card adapater.

OCZ didn't offer much detail on the controller other than to say it was Toshiba IP on board and supports the full NVMe 1.1b specification. However, it's safe to say OCZ and Toshiba got game because the drive boasts specs conservatively at 2.4GB/sec for reads and 1.6GB/sec for writes in peak sequential transfer bandwidth. IOPs are rated at 210K and 140K for writes respectively. Again, these are conservative numbers, as you'll see shortly but that puts the drive at or near the top of the pack versus recent entries like Samsung's 950 Pro or Intel's SSD 750. The RevoDrive 400 is based on cutting-edge 15nm Toshiba MLC NAND technology and sports a 5 year warranty. OCZ was also eager to prove out the new RevoDrive 400's performance so they had a demo system setup burning-up some quick and dirty benchmarks.

In the ATTO test you'll see the RevoDrive 400 actually peaks at 2.69GB/sec for reads and also hits every bit of that 1.6GB/sec write spec for large sequential transfers. Smaller file workloads are also met with solid performance, in line with some of the top NVMe drives on the market, though we'd have to assume fine tuning is still going on at the firmware level. Capacities for the RevoDrive 400 drop in at 128GB, 256GB, 512GB (the drive tested above) and 1TB.

OCZ was also showcasing some of their new SATA-based solutions at CES as well, including the new Trion 150, which is a follow-on SSD to the Trion 100.

The new OCZ Trion 150 is based on 15nm Toshiba MLC NAND (versus 19nm NAND in the Trion 100) and caps out at the max SATA spec of 500 MB/sec or so, for reads and writes. We'd expect this drive to be a bargain like the Trion 100 before it, at less than .40 per GiB, though pricing was not confirmed for either the Trion 150 or the RevoDrive 400.

Also on hand were a range of NVMe solutions from OCZ for big iron applications and the data center. The OCZ Z-Drive 6300 series offers higher overall bandwidth specified at 2.6GB/sec for reads but siginificantly higher IO throughput peaking at 700K for random reads and 160K for random writes. Expect these high endurance, QoS and TCO optimized drives, which scale up to a monsterous 6.4TB, to retail for significantly higher prices than the RevoDrive 400 line as they're targeted for mission critical enterprise applications.