OCZ RevoDrive 3 X2 240GB PCI-E SSD Extreme PC Week One wonders if, after ratifying the SATA 6Gb/s standard, the people at the SATA-IO (Serial ATA International Organization) gave themselves a pat on the back to say job well done, that’s that future-proofed for a while, we can relax now. OCZ RevoDrive 3 X2 240GB PCI-E SSD Scorchio: OCZ's RevoDrive 3 X2 …
Amazing, someone designs the new Ferrari/Aston Martin of the SSD world, yet just like the cars the price makes it available for the richest 10% of the population.
I question whether the unit cost needs to be that expensive or not. Takes you back the advent of the then sata drives...... Now they are as cheap as chips.
High Price, and appalling support, bad quality (heat sinks falling off them!). Tried to use two in a system and was abruptly told to go buy their enterprise drives at $5k each if I wanted to do a software raid with them.
Have earlier Revo Products and they work fine in this configuration. But it seems OCZ will do anything to drive folks to the enterprise market including alienating them.
All I can say is HELLLOOO FusionIO!!
That is what they have today. To keep costs down they are using off the shelf components. Down the road, they could easily bypass the SATA/SAS portion. Sandforce or one of the others could easily make a controller that provides access to a PCIe bus and have direct access to the FLASH chips.
It is really only a matter of time before you see SATA/SAS go away and you PCIe slots in computers for storage. Even a NAS or SAN could go with PCIe.
The current technology is still in its infancy and we will soon see what it can really do.
Graphics card takes up 2 of the slots. Next unusable as it would block the gfx fan, next has a usb 3 header. Just no space for anything else.
On the other side of the case, there's space for 8 HDDs. SSDs have dropped in price so much, they're becoming affordable, bit of RAID and off you go.
Until mobo designers start to include more PCI slots, this technology isn't for me.
I still think I could have bought 1TB of storage instead of that 60GB SSD. But then again, loading screens are sooo bearable now... and my GFX also takes 2 slots. And I found an extra tray for HDD behind the PSU, where I don't even have to disassemble nothing else to reach it...you gotta love Full-ATX cases. But no room on PCI or PCI-e slots.
But... one extra TB... or maybe 2 at same price tag... sigh.
As with everything in IT, the price of PCIe SSDs will come down and they will scale vertically - very soon a 20TB PCIe SSD will be available for £300.
In parallel, motherboard manufacturers will solder a SSD chip on their boards as a giveaway, and after that the SSD chip will be part and parcel of the CPU - by that time we may have 10mn or 5mn lithography.
Which means a dedicated SAN will be dead. I mean, seriously, if we have 20, 50, or 100TB on a PCIe card close to the northbridge of the CPU, and 10GigEth networks for the 4 way DRBD, why wasting more money on a separate SAN system.
Did I say will? SAN IS dead, if you have enough budget.
"Which means a dedicated SAN will be dead. I mean, seriously, if we have 20, 50, or 100TB on a PCIe card close to the northbridge of the CPU, and 10GigEth networks for the 4 way DRBD, why wasting more money on a separate SAN system."
Unless you want to run a cluster (especially VMs). Or have failover hardware. Or want to manage backups centrally.
Unfortunately with the durability of NAND cells decreasing with cell size, technology seems to already be pretty close to the point of diminishing returns - i.e. chip features cannot be shrunk much further - so the usual more-for-less-with-each-year scaling may not apply to flash based SSDs. But quite likely there will be a successor technology.
However I can't say I have much confidence in the reliability of non-enterprise SSD - but after thinking a bit about this technology shift we are starting to change to SSD on production servers that have significant random I/O activity, DRBD'd onto a standby machine that has good old spinning disk.
I'm toying with the idea of using Seagate's hybrid drives for VMs that need a greater volume of data than we can presently afford to put on SSD.
"the price of PCIe SSDs will come down and they will scale vertically - very soon a 20TB PCIe SSD will be available for £300." That’s a very optimistic comment – totally detached from reality – honestly – you’re not paying for the technology – you’re paying for the cutting edge slice of Techno-mania. In any case, SSDs may come down in price – but there will always be something that’s “better.” They want us to keep chasing "Puff" the Techno-dragon; and we will never get to the point when we have all that we want: I was happy with my i7 for a few months – they Sandybridge came out: pointless.
Good question, because this does not seem to have made my Windows 7 installation boot faster. Or maybe it was already fast. Its great for video editing though – or apps where you lob huge files around. For its price – it’s not worth it. But us geeks want the speed rush – it’s a rush alright – 5 mins or there abouts – it lasted.
But these cards are pretty much a SAS RAID controller with four attached SAS/SATA disks in RAID0.
They are not any faster than an equivalent RAID0 configuration with discrete drives would be, and that is not the point anyway. They offer the same performance in a more compact form factor than several disks and a controller, and I think THAT is the main idea behind these cards.
I've used the earlier version on BSD, where it presents 4 ATA drives for you to use. Can't remember if they presented as AHCI or ATA, but worked out of the box, no drivers required.
At least on that version, the board was basically two SiI SATA controllers, each hooked up to two Sandforce based SSDs.
Correct.
It apprears as one logical SAS drive and can be booted and used just like any old spinny drive. I've tested with Ubuntu, Kubuntu and formatted it under ext 2,3 and 4, no issues.
I just get the nagging feeling that maybe Ubuntu is also doing some win-like auto defrag in the background and I don't know how to disable it.
I got one! I got one! Err – what now? Win7 still loads similar to my RAID array; maybe I’m just spoilt. I basically wanted to eliminate the HD bottle-neck when video editing. The figures are amazing – on average 750 MB/s and peaking at 1000 MB/s – that’s very impressive. There is just one thing you need to bare in mind with Revo Drives, and I suspect most other SSDs, they don’t take kindly to BSOD episodes. They can be bricked by them; you need to take care and not treat it like a normal SATA or IDE Hard Drive.
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