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OCZ RevoDrive X2 240GB PCI-Express SSD Review

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On December 20, 2010, 5:51 AM

The solid-state drive market continues to grow at a rapid pace and competition is starting to heat up once again. While there was once just a few controllers worth picking from, half a dozen viable choices occupy the market now.

The original RevoDrive carried not one, but two SandForce SF-1200 controllers in RAID and boasted up to 80,000 IOPS. As impressive as this was, the follow up model we are testing today completely blows it out of the water. Less than two months ago, OCZ announced the RevoDrive X2 effectively doubling the number SF-1200 controllers used in RAID and coming in sizes from 100GB through an insane 960GB.


Unlike traditional solid state drives, the RevoDrive X2 is a PCI-Express SSD. That means it doesn't rely on the SATA interface, making it very different from previous products that we have reviewed, so let's dive in for a closer look.

Read the complete review.

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User Comments: 28

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  1. What makes you think that? Did you read the "Understanding Results" section of the user manual?

    Time to logon ? the number of seconds from the Windows start point (not

    from computer start point) until the display Windows logon screen (or

    welcome screen).

    Logon to desktop - the number of seconds from the successful logon to a

    Desktop Ready event.

    Total time to desktop =Time to logon + Logon to desktop

    Therefore its 9 + 5 = 14 seconds

    Ohh and it never measures the time from the BIOS, only from the Windows load screen just as we do.

    Have you not noticed the difference between the 5 seconds you thought it took and the 14 that it was really taking? Maybe try a stop watch.

    [image link]

    Hey mate, if its Total time to desktop =Time to logon + Logon to desktop, why would you add 5 + 9(which is my total time to desktop)??

    [image link]

    shouldnt it be 5+4??

  2. I bought a RevoDrive X2 240 Gig and stuck it in my Asus P6X58D. Out of the box the free version of HD Tune had it averaging about 290MB/s with a range between 170MB/s and 408MB/s which is pretty lame given the cost. Boot was also about 15 seconds as this review showed - from when windows starts loading until the login prompt appears. Pretty depressing and I was tempted to take it back. That said, out of the box its stripe size is 64K which favors larger file operations, which isn't exactly what is needed for quick boot performance.

    I broke the raid via the SI bios options and re-striped it down from 64K to 16K and boot times dropped to less than 10 seconds and the free version of HD tune started showing average throughput around 450MB/s.

    I then broke the raid again and re-striped down to 8K. The average throughput rose to 471MB/s and boot times remained at less than 10 seconds.

    To me, this says a lot. It means the RevoDrive X2 is very fast and configurable to the types of file access a person might need. One can make the stripe size as high as 128K which should really help performance on those big files at the expense of the smaller stuff. I didn't test that size as it's really not suitable for my usage patterns and I have not tried to replicate all of the tests the author did. I've seen enough to save me a trip back to Microcenter to return the thing.

    As far as drive cost is concerned, it's pretty expensive for a consumer drive. I say consumer drive because I'd never put an MLC based drive on one of my write-intensive servers. I like to keep my customers. I paid more than $2 gig for this but it wasn't that terribly long ago that I spent $100 gig for an HD when 2 gig was considered big. It's all relative.

  3. Bought a revodrive x2 240GB a few months ago and running on a so called compatible motherboard (Gigabyte EX58A-UD7) according to OCZ. Along with many others, I'm also experiencing data corruption during shutdown of the PC. Checkdisk runs during startup and deletes important OS files. My advice would be to stay away from these drives until compatibility issues are sorted out and DONT BE A BETA TESTER FOR OCZ.

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