OCZ RevoDrive PCIe 4x RAID SSD Solid State Drive Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips

Linus Tech Tips unboxes and gives an early look at OCZ's RevoDrive, a bootable PCI Express solid state drive that combines multiple flash chips in a RAID 0 configuration to deliver high performance. The host explains that the device uses a PCI Express Gen 2 x4 interface and an onboard RAID controller to bypass the bottlenecks of traditional SATA, delivering significantly higher bandwidth than a single SATA SSD. He walks through the packaging, noting the inclusion of a quick installation guide and the physical layout of the card, including a visible wire modification on the PCB that hints at a late revision. The video covers the internal architecture, identifying a PCI RAID bridge chip and two SandForce controllers that run in parallel to achieve doubled bandwidth compared to a single controller. He provides rough performance expectations, citing up to 75,000 IOPS for 4K random writes, plus sustained reads up to 540 MB/s and sustained writes around 400 MB/s, highlighting that the system should be both bootable and straightforward to install with Windows, albeit requiring the RAID driver during installation. In closing, he reflects on OCZ’s design choice to mate multiple flash controllers onto a single card and notes the potential for a more affordable high-performance storage solution, comparing it to the older Z Drive while emphasizing practical installability and use cases for OS boot drives. The overall takeaway is that the RevoDrive aims to offer a compelling price-to-performance proposition by delivering RAID-like speeds in a compact PCIe card without the need for separate drive bays and cables, making it a notable development in the evolution of PCIe SSDs.

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