OCZ RevoDrive Review: SSD RAID + PCI-Express

We've assembled a small group of drives to compare to the Revo, with several differing characteristics. Our comparison today is something of a SandForce party—the Corsair F100, GSkill Phoenix Pro (review soon), and the RevoDrive itself are all built around the SF-1200. Crucial is the odd man out; the C300 uses Marvell's 88SS9174-BJP2. The Marvell controller has only shown up in the C300 to date, and details on its design are hard to come by—Marvell doesn't list the controller or mention it on their website at all.

The GSkill drive should also give us a gander at how the SF-1200 scales when we move from one to two controllers while keeping drive size identical, although the performance delta between the two could be affected slightly by the combined latency of the SiI 3124 controller and the bridge chip it relies on.

Cost Per Gigabyte: How Does Revo Rate?


The OCZ RevoDrive costs 38 percent more per GB than Crucial's C300 (although that drive is out-of-stock in a number of places), but the card's dual SF-1200 controllers should offer an excellent price/performance ratio. $400, however, is still a fair chunk of cash—the second-most-expensive drive, Corsair's F120, is over $100 cheaper for the same capacity.

We tossed in two hard drives to give you an idea of the relative costs. Given the dirt-low price of 1TB drives, we expect an increasing number of enthusiasts will switch to relatively small SSDs augmented by large storage arrays. At the same time, however, WD's 600GB VelociRaptor—unquestionably the fastest hard drive on the market—is less than a fifth as expensive as the cheapest SSD on our list. This suggests that WD can continue to eke out profitable sales on its high-performance HDDs--there's still a substantial gap in price per GB.