Comments Locked

23 Comments

Back to Article

  • Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    599$ for 240GB isn't that bad. Any idea on the price of 120GB version?
  • H8ff0000 - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    If it follows suit with what they usually do, probably a bit more than half. $349-379?
  • shabby - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    Don't be silly, the 120gb will cost $299.5
  • Bolas - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    I've been waiting for this for a long time. Right product, right price.

    Bootable PCIe drive with RAID support and the current generation of SandForce controller.

    Hope it's compatible with my Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7 motherboard!

    If so, it should be a great improvement over my Intel x25m G2 160GB SSD, currently the limiting factor in my computer's performance.
  • george1924 - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    What's the deal with linux on these things? It SHOULD just show up as any other HDD/SSD, but does it? I thought that some of the first ones confused Linux too much to boot from it.
  • erple2 - Wednesday, June 1, 2011 - link

    I don't think so. The standard HDD/SSD shows up under Linux since they're powered by the SATA interface, not a PCIe interface. The nature of the driver structure under Linux kind of makes that somewhat impossible.

    Unless the drive shows up as a "PCIe controller that has a SATA controller built in" type of an arrangement, and does the appropriate translations in hardware.
  • Olternaut - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    I'm definitely getting the 240GB x2 version.

    Gonna combine this with an OCZ vertex 3 with whatever capacity I can afford and possibly another high capacity HD as part of my new uber build!
  • dac7nco - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    This is seriously overdue... how did OCZ of all people manage to pass TRIM commands through a RAID controller?!
  • GullLars - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    Custom firmware. Considering it's RAID-0 and likely a HBA, it's probably a bit easier than more complex RAID sollutions.
  • xakor - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    Some people just crap money...
  • GuinnessKMF - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    ... and yet it's still more functional than chrome spinners.
  • neotiger - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    What is the random read IOPS performance of this and X2? That's the most important performance aspect of SSD.

    Does it have capacitors to flush data in case of power outage?

    I wonder if this could be used as a poor man's FusionIO...
  • GullLars - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    It could, but you're better off going with 2R0 M4 or Vertex 3 128GB. That's a sweet-spot for price/performance/ports/capacity. You will be close to maxing out your southbridge on both bandwidth and IOPS, but not limiting scaling.
    The big difference between Fusion-IO ioDrive and this is latency. To reach the same IOPS, you need about 3 times higher QD.
    If you want something hardcore yet bootable, Areca 1880-ix with 4GB RAM and BBU with 4-8R0 M4 128GB will get you something making this (revodrive 3) look like an indilinx barefoot drive next to this.
  • Nordic Rune Project - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    1,5 GB's Read and 1,2 Write are worthy speeds for an expensive card (as I expected it to be). It more than doubles the SATA 6G limits. So surely I'll get one of these for my Nordic Rune Project :)

    (I hope they're released to the public before or in October BTW).
  • vlado08 - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    You can destroy this drive in about 23 days
    23days*24hours*60minutes*60seconds*1.2GB/s = 2 384 640 GB 240 GB*10 000 cycles = 2 400 000 GB
  • Olternaut - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    Huh? Can someone respond to this please?
  • vlado08 - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    Enthusiasts like to bench a lot and faster speed allows them by benching to destroy the SSD faster. Also if you are editing HD video files by getting faster transfer speed (now with usb 3.0) you can move back and fort masive files more quickly and more easily and this is very tempting but rewriting big files is not good for SSD.
    My calculations are for constant write at maximum write speed of 1.2GB/s and for 10 000 cycles for write/erase. This is not normal usage but my poin is that faster speed allows you to do it.
  • GullLars - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    No, actually you're wrong. Benchmarking with IOmeter and ATTO will generate close to no writes because it's just 0x0000 fill. Other benchmarks use real or incompressible data, wich is worst case for sandforce. This is a scenario known as "rouge data recorder", a bug where software writes random data sequentially at max speed to the drive at 100% load 24/7.

    Still, 10.000 cycles of let's say 240GB is 2400TB of data to write. Worst case is sequential incompressible data, which is roughly 360MB/s IIRC. That will give you 1,3TB pr hour = 1850 hours. That is 77 days.

    Keep in mind this is what the drive is rated for at max operating temperature, and should represent a close to worst case. With RAISE, ECC, and reserved space to take worn out sectors from, i will speculate a likely D50 (half of devices dead) somewhere between 6-12 months. This is however a totally unrealistic usage scenario. For this you would go with enterprice SLC drives, with 10-50x higher endurance.
  • vlado08 - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    "With four controllers the RevoDrive 3 X2 is good for up to 1.5GB/s reads and 1.2GB/s writes"

    So it is not 360MB/s bur 1.2GB/s this is 4.2TB per hour = 100.8TB per day

    Probably there are virus programs which are made to worn SSD and you may not notice it if they are written to do deir work during idle times.
  • vlado08 - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    sorry for my english

    bur = but

    deir = their
  • Wardrop - Wednesday, June 1, 2011 - link

    I believe he's referring to sequential read/write performance of incompressible data. The figures you quoted are maximum speeds, which would only be obtainable if writing highly compressible data. Most recent respectable benchmarking applications write incompressible data, hence if 360MB/s is the speed at which this drive writes incompressible data, then GullLars's maths is correct, and yours is wrong.

    And even if you did get 1.2GB/s write performance, that doesn't mean 1.2GB/s is being written to NAND. If the data is highly compressible, then it's likely only a fraction of that is being written, possibly well under the 360MB/s mentioned by GullLars.
  • Olternaut - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    So where does HSDL fit in this equation?

    Any word on that Anand?
  • marraco - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link

    Tomshardware published a complete review this morning, I read the first pages, made an hour pause, and returned for the remaining pages, but the article was removed :(

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now