OCZ Brings out Affordable PCI Express RevoDrive SSD

Even as computer suppliers have been flooding the market with newer and better PCs, OCZ has been keeping the flow of solid state drives quite steady, unveiling, not too long ago, the Vertex 2 and Onyx SSDs. The same outfit is now expanding its portfolio with yet another so-called 'affordable' solution, though the interface of choice, this once, is not any version of SATA. Instead, when making the RevoDrive, OCZ went for the PCI Express approach.

The RevoDrive is designed for the PCI Express connection and is composed of MLC (multi-level cell) NAND Flash memory chips. These chips are managed by not one, but two SandForce SF-1200 controllers, configured in a RAID setup. All in all, the storage units can read data at up to 540MB/s and write at up to 480MB/s. 4K random write performance is of 80,000 IOPS. To this performance is added a significant reliability, represented by the MTBF of 2 million hours.

“The RevoDrive is the first PCIe SSD that delivers both performance and affordability and radically alters the SSD landscape,” said Ryan Petersen, CEO of the OCZ Technology Group. “Up to this point PCIe SSDs have been reserved for enterprise applications and priced out of the range of many consumers, the bootable RevoDrive SSD changes the game by delivering a PCIe based solution that costs as low as $3 per gigabyte, exceptional small file write IOPS of over 80K, which is the most available in any low-cost solution.”

It should probably be noted that, unlike most PCI Express SSDs, this model does not suffer from the inability to act as a boot drive. All in all, the product should significantly improve boot-up times and load times, in addition to being quiet because of having no mechanical parts. OCZ is already selling 120GB and 240GB versions, priced at $390 and $700, respectively.