The OCZ RevoDrive 3 X2 Preview: Second-Gen SandForce Goes PCIe

[palladin9479]

Hmm interesting tidbit about Windows 7 not supporting native unmap. Seeing as its rarely used in the SCSI world I can understand them not including it. Has anyone contacted Microsoft about this? Looks to be a Windows hotfix / update that they would need to develop.

Otherwise I've been debating getting a RevoDrive X2 for my next big upgrade. I'm replacing a RAID0 of 4x7200RPM drives and wondering if its worth the cost.

 

[Guest]

got a RevoDrive X4 over 6months ago and still cant use it as there are major conflicts with ati video cards in all 3 of my macnines.

ocz claim its an ati driver problem
ati claim its an ocz driver problem

 

[acku]

[citation][nom]sad ocz user[/nom]got a RevoDrive X4 over 6months ago and still cant use it as there are major conflicts with ati video cards in all 3 of my macnines.ocz claim its an ati driver problemati claim its an ocz driver problem[/citation]

Do you need help getting an answer from OCZ or AMD? Give us a ping at advocate[at]bestofmedia.com

 

[Guest]

I'm still trying to figure out the "niche" market for this. It's the equivalent of RAID 0, so for a database you need to duplicate/mirror every transaction, cutting throughput in half. Plus SSDs are not archival, so will need frequent HD (or tape) backup for external storage. Might be used for capturing streaming very high def, 4K 4-4-4 video with 16-bits per color, but capacity becomes an issue. At 500MB/sec, 240GB gets filled up in less than 10 minutes. And you NEVER want to "fill up" an SSD. Plus HD copies would again be needed anyway for backup, preferably directly from the input stream (not a copy off the SSD). High-res image capture from 50+Megapixel backs are limited by the transfer rate from the camera back, but the 3-X2 might be useful reading those 150MB+ TIFs and for "scratch" files. But again, 240GB is only about 3-4 days worth of shooting on a typical pro shoot. Maybe render farms where keeping multiple GPUs fed is an issue? What desktop "power user" does anything that would make a 3-X2 noticeable above a single high-end SSD? Maybe animated 3D content creation? Who are you guys?

 

[mapesdhs]

Unnompressed video processing is almost entirely sequential I/O. SSDs are pointless
for this. Bunch of SCSI, Enterprise SATA, FC or SAS is more logical. Btw, very high
def would be 8K. These days, 4K is kinda normal. Most of the project cfg files on an
IFFFS system I recently obtained were 4K (some less, others more). Also, 4K at that
kind of quality is more like 2GB/sec. 10 or 12bits/channel is more common.

You're right though, for the performance being offered, one would imagine the kind
of user who would find it useful is the same kind that would also want redundancy,
backup, reliability, etc., in which case a couple of Vertex3s in RAID1 (or whatever)
would be much safer and more than fast enough.

Ian.

 

[low_tech]

[citation][nom]supertrek32[/nom]You know, almost any application that would actually benefit from these speeds won't be very effective on these drives. Why? Not enough storage space.It's like having a car that can do 300 miles an hour, but can only carry enough fuel to go 20 miles. Does it have a niche? Yeah. Is it practical? Not really.[/citation]


What about MS SQL? I see SQL DB's anywhere from 300 GB up to 1 TB in size and they ALL benefit from fast disk I/O. You must not work in a Enterprise sized business.

 

[penguintech]

I have two OCZ Colossus Drives in my desktop... worth every penny I saved for them!

 

[Guest]

I'd love to see a version of this which acts as an SATA controller and intelligent cache for several much larger connected hard drives.

 

[bgeneto]

Weird results for random 4K read! For example, can anyone explain why is the M4 128GB 4K random read performance less than half the performance of the M4 256GB? Read performance should not be affected by the drive capacity, only write... Maybe the restriction to LBA 16GB is affecting the reads, any reasonable explanation out there?

 

[mapesdhs]

Quite often lower capacity models have fewer channels/controllers, thus the lower
performance. I don't know if this is case with the example referred to in your
question though - just check the tech specs of each model, that should reveal all.

Ian.

 

[bgeneto]

[citation][nom]mapesdhs[/nom]just check the tech specs of each model, that should reveal all.Ian.[/citation]
I've checked, the read specs are the same (except for write performance), even toms said so for M$ 128GB: "At least you can expect the same read performance, though." as you can read in the "Best SSDs For The Money: July 2011":
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-ssd-caching,2966-5.html

 

[mapesdhs]

In that case, I've no idea... (wierd)

Ian.

 

[Guest]

If a person was running databases that are under extremely heavy load at the enterprise level they would probably be running the entire database on a ramdisk with battery backup and automatic image to drive every few minutes. I really wish OS developers and motherboard manufacturers would take a look at the cheap prices of ram these days and work to create main-boards and the supporting software to allow a user to install 64GB or higher amounts of ram into their system with a mirror in bios to a hard drive or ssd that would emulate a simple drive from the view of the OS. This drive could then be used exclusively for installing the OS or other ultra high-speed needs. If you had the option to boot windows from memory their would be little to no bootup time and the system would act more like it was resuming from sleep mode on a cold boot.