OCZ RevoDrive 350 PCI Express SSD Review

As we've noted in our previous SSD coverage, though IOMeter is clearly a well-respected industry standard drive benchmark, we're not completely comfortable with it. The fact of the matter is, though our actual results with IOMeter appear to scale properly, it is debatable whether or not certain access patterns, as they are presented to and measured on an SSD, actually provide a valid example of real-world performance for the average end user or application workload. That said, we do think IOMeter is a good gauge for relative available IO throughput for a given storage solution. In addition, there are certain very high-end workloads you can invoke on a drive with IOMeter, that you really can't with any other benchmark tool available currently.

IOMeter 
Storage IO Performance Measurement Tool
In the following tables, we're showing two sets of access patterns: our "Workstation" pattern, with an 8K transfer size, 80% reads (20% writes) and 80% random (20% sequential) access and our Database access pattern of 4K transfers, 67% reads (34% writes) and 100% random access.








With mostly read throughput, the OCZ RevoDrive 350 offers best-in-class performance versus any of these higher-end PCI Express SSD solutions we tested. For write throughput, the new RevoDrive 350 holds its own as well and just edges out the previous-generation RevoDrive 3, but it can't keep up with the SLC-based LSI WarpDrive and Fuion-io ioDrive drive.  Regardless, performance is still excellent overall with these mixed read/write workloads seeing peaks of approximately 100K IOPS on the new RevoDrive 350. With its read strength, the RevoDrive 350 would serve really well as a workstation-class storage solution for professional video editing and the like. For enthusiasts, of course, it's a natural as well and a big upgrade in any situation versus OCZ's previous-gen product.


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