OCZ RevoDrive 350 PCI Express SSD Review

OCZ's RevoDrive series has been a popular enthusiast and workstation-class storage product family for years now. The last time we looked at an OCZ RevoDrive, the RevoDrive 3 X2 offered smoking-fast performance and bandwidth of up to 1.5GB/sec for reads and 1.25GB/sec for writes thanks to its PCI Express-based design, which basically comprises four Sandforce-based SSDs on a single card, alleviating the 6Gbps SATA bottleneck.  Since then, OCZ was acquired by Toshiba and has been going through its product stack, revamping its SSD portfolio with fresh re-designs based on Toshiba NAND Flash memory for not only increased performance but better cost structure as well.

OCZ has now replaced the RevoDrive 3 series with an almost completely re-designed product that we'll be looking at today. The RevoDrive 350 is based on the same OCZ VCA 2.0 (Virtualized Controller Architecture) technology as the previous generation but is now enabled with a PCI Express X8 card interface and up to 4 LSI SandForce SD-2282 SSD processors, along with 19nm Toshiba NAND Flash. The good news is, not only is the new RevoDrive 350 faster at 1.8GB/sec claimed bandwidth for sequential reads and 1.7GB/sec for sequential writes, but it's also significantly more affordable, at literally half the price of the previous gen RevoDrive 3. Let's take a closer look at the new RevoDrive 350 from OCZ...

OCZ RevoDrive 350 480GB PCI Express SSD Specifications & Features

Max Read: up to 1800MB/s Max Write: up to 1700MB/s Random Write 4KB, (4K Align,QD32): 140,000 IOPS Seek Time: 0.1ms Supports Windows TRIM, Garbage Collection Windows Bootable Device Windows 7,8,8.1 32/64-bit, Linux Support Planned Interface:  PCIe 2.0 x8 19nm Multi-Level Cell (MLC) Flash 19nm Multi-Level Cell (MLC) Flash 19nm Multi-Level Cell (MLC) Flash 19nm Multi-Level Cell (MLC) Flash Power Consumption:  Idle 9.5W, Active 14W Operating Temp: 0°C ~ 55°C

Air Flow Required: 300LFM @ 55°C Storage Temp: -45°C ~ +85°C Shock Resistant up to 500G SuperScale Processor with VCA 2.0 LSI SandForce SF-2282 NAND Controller Rated for 50GB/day of host writes for 3 years under typical client workloads. MTBF: 2 million hours 3-Year Warranty Note:  Specifications are for 480GB model. Different specs may apply depending on model/capacity. Full list specs here.

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OCZ's RevoDrive 350 will be available at the following capacities and price points:

• RevoDrive 350 240G @ $529.99
• RevoDrive 350 480G @ $829.99
• RevoDrive 350 960G @ $1,299.99

So if you do the math, the RevoDrive 350 is priced at $2.25 per GiB, $1.72 per GiB and $1.35 per GiB for OCZ's 240GB, 480GB and 960GB models, respectively. That's not cheap when you consider the average SATA SSD is dropping in at well under $1 per GiB these days. Then again, you'd need up to four of the fastest SATA SSDs on the market currently to approach the performance and available bandwidth of the RevoDrive 350.

Up to 1.8GB/sec of throughput and 140K IOPS; good mother of glorious bandwidth, let's take a closer look at what makes the RevoDrive 350 tick.