OCZ RevoDrive 350 PCI Express SSD Review
Test System, SANDRA Disk and File System Benchmarks
Our Test Methodologies:
Under each test condition, the SSDs tested here were installed as secondary volumes in our testbed, with a dedicated disk for the OS and benchmark software installations. The drives were left blank without partitions wherever possible, unless a test required them to be partitioned and formatted, as was the case with our ATTO and CrystalDiskMark benchmark tests. 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.
Important Note:
We should also underscore the fact that the other PCI Express SSDs we're comparing the RevoDrive 350 to here are admittedly very stiff competition and in many cases cost literally thousands of dollars more than the consumer and workstation-targeted RevoDrive line. Rather than comparing the new RevoDrive to a stable of standard SATA SSDs, however, we felt it made more sense to compare it to other PCI Express SSDs on the market that are in its performance class.
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Motherboard - Graphics Card - Memory - Audio - Storage-
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Hardware Used: Intel Core i7-3960X Intel DX79SR, X79 chipset NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 16GB Kingston DDR3-1600 Integrated on board Intel X25E 160GB SSD (OS Drive) OCZ RevoDrive 3 X2 480GB PCIe LSI WarpDrive 300GB PCIe OCZ RevoDrive X2 240GB PCIe Fusion-io ioDrive 160GB Fusion-io ioXtreme 80GB PCIe Intel SSD 910 800GB PCIe SSD OCZ RevoDrive 350 480GB PCIe SSD |
OS - Chipset Drivers - Video Drivers - |
Relevant Software: Windows 7 Ultimate x64 Latest Intel Inf package Latest NVIDIA WHQL Benchmarks Used: IOMeter 2010 ATTO v2.46 CrystalDiskMark v3.01 Alex-IS AS-SSD Benchmark 1.6.42 SiSoftware Sandra 2013 |
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For our first set of tests, we used SiSoft SANDRA, the the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. Here, we used the Physical Disk test suite and provided the results from our comparison SSDs. The benchmarks were run without formatting on all drives and read and write performance metrics are detailed below.
SANDRA's purely sequential and rather short read/write workloads in this test allow the RevoDrive 350 to stretch its legs in terms of read performance where it showed itself to be the fastest of our group. Write performance of the new RevoDrive was about in line with the previous generation product, according to SANDRA. The other drives tested here are mostly SLC NAND-based product, which adds to their cost significantly but also offers better overall write throughput.
SANDRA's File System benchmark exhibits combined Read/Write throughput on blank, formatted volumes.
