OCZ RevoDrive 350 PCI Express SSD Review

Performance Summary and Conclusion

Performance Summary: The OCZ RevoDrive 350 displayed excellent performance across a wide variety of workloads, transfer sizes and access patterns. The product exhibited very competitive performance versus the other PCI Express SSDs we tested, many of which are far more expensive SLC (Single Level Cell) NAND-based SSD cards. With read requests, the OCZ RevoDrive 350 was actually able to out-perform all drives in our test group on multiple occasions.




Considering OCZ's new RevoDrive 350 on the whole, here's what we're looking at: This new OCZ PCI Express SSD is built better, with a simpler, more elegant design that has fewer points of failure and less complexity. It's also built with newer, 19nm, lower-powered Toshiba NAND Flash and a more robust (and dare we say more stylish) cooling solution and aluminum casing. The new RevoDrive 350 is also significantly faster than the previous generation of RevoDrive 3 products, and it competes with the likes of some of the fastest PCI Express SSDs on the market that can often times cost considerably more. In certain cases it's even faster than these drives. Finally, OCZ managed to cut the cost of the RevoDrive 350 literally in half versus the MSRP of their previous generation of RevoDrive 3 products. And yes, it's Windows-bootable too, which can't be said for a few of the drives we tested in our performance evaluation. In short, OCZ has managed to improve upon their RevoDrive line in virtually every way, delivering a superior product for a lot less. This is great stuff, plain and simple.

At $829 for the 480GB RevoDrive 350 we tested (240GB at $529, 960GB at $1299), it still isn't cheap and over 2X the cost of SATA SSD pricing, but with up to 1.8GB/sec of bandwidth, enthusiasts and workstation professionals that live on the bleeding-edge of performance will eat this thing up all day long. In fact, unfortunately, it looks like the product is temporarily out of stock with what looks to be a release date of 5/26 on certain e-tail sites. Keep checking Amazon pages as the product will likely hit there first.

In the meantime, we have a new favorite PCI Express SSD on hand here at the HotHardware.com test labs and it's none other than OCZ Storage Solutions' RevoDrive 350.


   
  •  Killer read and write performance
  • Copious amounts of bandwidth
  • More elegant, simpler design than previous gen
  • Better cooling solution versus previous gen
  • Can be as fast or faster than more expensive SLC-based PCIe SSDs
  • Half the price of previous gen RevoDrive 3
  • Bootable
  • Still pricey at over 2X the cost of SATA drives

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