Gadgetory

I wouldn't have anybody that stuff okay today we're gonna be unboxing the OCC Revo Drive this is a bootable PCI Express solid-state drive it offers unmatched performance it is sand force driven it runs off PCI Express Gen 2 x4 and it has internal raid 0 so that's all the stuff off the front of the box which is pretty much all I needed to say about it it's what they didn't say surprisingly is that this is actually the first pci express based SSD that brings the price point down to something that would make it actually a reasonable replacement for a SATA based SSD so the Revo drive uses an onboard raid 0 PCI Express just basically it's just a little RAID controller chip I'll show it to you once we've actually got this open and I can show you the drive itself so all it's really doing is it's taking more flash chips and it's running them with two controllers and just running it in raid 0 and then instead of having to deal with the bottleneck of the SATA 2 interface OCZ hooks you up with a little RAID controller and a PCI Express interface and that's how you get all that performance out of it so here I'll here hold on let's see what's included with it first under gear is nothing comes in package here okay they got a little my SSD is faster than your hard drive which is true in 99.99999 percent of cases SSDs are much faster than hard drives here's a quick installation guide a locate a slot put it in how to boot to the Revo drive okay and installing windows on your Revo drive fairly straightforward so the only extra step you really need to do with a Revo drive are to configure it to be bootable which is basically like configuring any RAID controller to be bootable and then you just need to install the RAID controller driver when you're installing windows which is actually with Windows Vista and Windows 7 dead easy so pretty much anyone should be able to use one of these for their boot drive this is a full-height card okay span I'm just gonna show you all the main components here so first of all this oh wow look at that they've actually got a wire soldered on here so I guess they made a last-minute PCB revision and looks like they actually had to do some custom wiring now something to be aware of is that this will not cause any long-term effects because really a wire running on the outside of the PCB is exactly the same as any other trace or a wire running on the inside of the PCB but I was just I was a little bit surprised to see that very cool okay so here we have you know what this may actually be the I believe it's a silicon image RAID controller chip let me see if it actually says on their box I hope it does because I hate to I hate to not know uh-oh well not a whole lot I can do about it but I believe this is actually a PCI raid chip I believe this chip is actually a PCI Express to PCI bridge chip and then these are two SandForce SSD controllers so what happens is the PCI Express interface here is converted into a PCI compatible signal but you still get all of that bandwidth okay this this one is running RAID between the two SandForce controllers so basically you see this okay we've got eight here and then eight chips on the back so sixteen chips those ones are running off this SandForce controller and then the other sixteen chips on the PCB are running off the other SandForce controller so that means that you get effectively double the total performance double the total bandwidth out of a Revo drive that you do out of a single SandForce SSD so basically if you if you cut this up like this and then stuck a SATA 2 controller on there then that that would be it that would be once and for space SSD so ocz with a little bit of extra cost a little bit of engineering know-how has turned it into something that you can just plug in and you're running raid zero with just one thing pretty cool it's not really that different from what they've done in the past with the C Drive the biggest difference is that now it's affordable anyway I wouldn't be really doing my job unless I told you what the performance numbers are like so with 4k random writes they're promising up to 75,000 IAP s-- and with sustained reads and sustained writes up to 540 megabytes per second read and 480 megabytes per second right peak and then 400 megabytes per second sustained right so these are huge performance numbers and I think we've had a pretty good look at the Revo drive and one thing that OCC has figured out that it seems like a lot of other companies don't is performance parts should have a black PCB thank you for that