OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid: Solid-State Speed With Hard Drive Capacity

[Alvin Smith]

Sorry, guys ... did not read the article or the other comments but, based on the title and the intro, I feel I must comment.

COMMENT: While this beast might work (initially) and offer a lower cost-per-GB than an SSD, and faster performance than an HDD ... BRINGING THE HI FAILURE RATE OF AN HDD TO THIS REALM IS A VERY BAD IDEA ... espeaciall because it is "integral" ... Totally not worth the risk of corruption and outright mechanical failure. !

=Alvin=

 

[kittle]

If they made a "Hybrid-controller" card where I could supply my OWN SSD and my OWN mechanical drive -- I think they would have something.
With the size of drives these days the whole thing could fit in a regular 3.5" bay as opposed to sitting this big thing in the middle of your motherboard.

 

[tlmck]

Sounds like a $500 solution to a 5 cent problem to me.

 

[AndrewMD]

I just purchased a Seagate Hybrid, have yet to install it, but it seems like a better solution than going straight with SSD since capacity is also a concern..

 

[akula2]

What could be the PCI lane performance impact this scenario:

PCI Express-based GPU
PCI Express-based SSD
PCI Express-based TV Tuner
Any other PCI Express card (optional)

I think the PCI lane speed would take a hit, dropping to 4x. I would love if Tom takes up the "PCI Express Performance with P55/P67/Z68 chipsets" article.

Comments please, thanks.

 

[youssef 2010]

[citation][nom]Article[/nom]One last salient point: in this case, a write-back cache is great for speed. But as we mentioned in our Z68 Express coverage, data isn't synchronized between the cache and storage device. So, if someone yanks the SSD 311 off of a Z68-based motherboard operating in write-back mode, data could very well be lost. That's not a problem here, of course. However, consider that the failure of the solid-state component of the RevoDrive Hybrid would also likely end in loss.[/citation]

Are you serious, someone will yank the caching SSD from the rig? And why is that?
IMHO, that's a pretty probability.
Also, if the SSD part fails in case of this expensive piece of hardware, I suggest looking elsewhere for your storage needs

 

[nikorr]

[citation][nom]zybch[/nom]Yeah, like i want to use 'scary'RAID in my system. Screw that.[/citation]
The main idea here is not the RAID.

 

[Guest]

I have a Momentus XT and have compared it with regular Momentus performance. I'm not impressed - there's no real difference in my tests - boot, shutdown, load app, scan files, etc. I have another machine with a OCZ Vertex 3 and it's quite fast - 15 second Win 7 boot. But the nature of SSD failure worries me - i.e., instant, no-warning crash with no recovery tools (I've successfully used Spinrite on several occasions to bring back a crumbling hard drive to working condition).

It seems to me that the ideal architecture is a RAID 0 configuration using an SSD mirrored to an equal-sized partition on a fast MDD. The redundancy provides safety and fail-over recovery, while preserving the read, write, and random access performance of the SSD. The HDD in RAID protects against data loss from sudden failure of the SSD, and Sata 6 Gb/s speed is a reasonable approximation of what's achieved here with PCI-e for peak throughput - especially since few desktop workloads require such throughput.