14 DAY TRIAL // Among other things, OCZ seems to have become quite fond of the SandForce SSD controllers. Over the past few months, the company has unveiled or unleashed quite a number of solid state drives, such as the 480GB Agility and Vertex 2 units. Now that Computex has kicked off, it would arguably have been most unusual if the storage, memory and PSU manufacturer hadn't unveiled another such product. Sure enough, OCZ decided not to be unusual and, thus, it has brought out the RevoDrive line.
The mere fact that the new arrivals are based on the SandForce SF-1200 controller is enough to suggest significant data-transfer rates. Still, it is the fact that the newcomers are designed for the PCI Express interface that truly lets them work fast. To be more specific, the devices can read at 540MB/s and write at 490MB/s, or at least this is what AnandTech reports.
PCI Express SSDs were very intriguing when they first showed up. They weren't exactly in a position to provide data centers and/or servers with much storage, since there were only so many PCI Express slots on any platform. On the other hand, they were more capacious than SATA drives and, most importantly, they had the benefit of a much wider bandwidth. This meant faster access times and, of course, sustained read/write speeds, making them quite convenient in installations that had to deal with a large number of different data-access operations at once.
The RevoDrive line may not be as fabulous as the Z-Drive series, which comes in capacities of up to 2TB and, most importantly, read/write speeds of an astounding 1.3GB/s and 1.2GB/s. Nevertheless, the newcomers are definitely in a position to turn heads, especially with their unique component selection that will supposedly reduce costs by 10% to 20% on a single drive. Availability is not completely clear for now, but the 120GB and 240GB devices have pre-order prices of 433 Euro and 757 Euro.