OCZ RevoDrive X2 announced

Today OCZ announced the RevoDrive X2, which basically just takes the existing "Two SF-1200's in Raid0" design of the RevoDrive and quadruples it to four SF-1200 controllers in Raid0. They claim 740MBps peak sequential (reads no doubt) and up to 120k IOPS.

Like the first RevoDrive this device essentially just bundles some Vertex 2 drives with a cheap raid controller and sticks it all on a PCIe card. What I don't get is why they bothered with a gen2 revodrive without a gen2 controller, say like the SF-2000. Like the original RevoDrive, there's no TRIM, but they claim there's an idle garbage collection mechanism of some sort for self preservation, and the secure erase process to restore FOB (fresh out of box) performance is pretty laborious (break raid set, boot linux, run secure erase on individual drives, recreate raid set).

Full press release here.

Interesting, but the biggest problem is the controller; it uses a Silicon Image SiI-3124 PCI-X controller with 1066MB/s maximum throughput; converting it to a PCI-express 1.0 x4 interface using a bridge chip, which leaves 1.0GB/s throughput, though due to this not being native PCIe solution you may lose a bit of latency and throughput as well.

What OCZ needs is a newer controller chip from Silicon Image that is native PCI-express, and also PCI-express 2.0, where 4 lanes equals 2.0GB/s. Then that new SiI controller should support 4x6Gbps SATA ports, so you can use 6Gbps SSDs based on SF-2000.

Then it could do 1800MB/s sequential read and 600 - 1600MB/s sequential write, depending on whether the data is compressible or not. It should also be great for IOps.

Due to being Silicon Image, these controllers enjoy TRIM support under FreeBSD. That makes FreeBSD the only OS where this SSD receives TRIM support; you can't get TRIM for this SSD/controller on Windows as Silicon Image' drivers are quite bad and no Windows drivers from any vendor support TRIM on RAID yet. So using this SSD on FreeBSD would get you 4 devices: /dev/ada0 through /dev/ada3 for example; one device for each NAND controller; essentially this is just a 4-port SATA controller with on each port a Sandforce SSD. The Windows Silicon Image RAID drivers make it one device, but under FreeBSD you can do your own (more advanced) software RAID or use directly with ZFS.

That assumes the X2 employs the same Sil-3124 as the original RevoDrive, and while they haven't stated anywhere which controller it actually is, I wouldn't be surprised if its the same. A quick and dirty addition to the product line with no new innovation required - I guess it makes sense for them from an ROI standpoint.

Pretty cool about FreeBSD and TRIM but not sure about the statement "no windows drivers from any vendor support TRIM on RAID yet" - I thought Intel did?

No, that's a common misconception, partly caused by Intel's confusing press release. Intel's AHCI drivers support TRIM. The AHCI drivers are used also when the controller is set to RAID mode in BIOS, and follows a different I/O path than RAID configurations, where TRIM support is absent.

As such, you can use RAID on HDDs and have your SSD on your Intel controller together, running in RAID mode, while still having TRIM capability on the SSD. But you can't make a RAID of the SSDs and still have TRIM capability. So no TRIM on RAID on Windows yet.

Intel and Microsoft are the only driver brands which have TRIM-capable Windows drivers; so if you install nVidia/AMD/ALi/ULi/VIA chipset driver then you won't have any TRIM capability at all no matter whether you run in AHCI mode or not. That doesn't mean you can't have TRIM on boards with these chipsets; just do not install the chipset driver or revert back to Microsoft AHCI/IDE driver, which DOES support TRIM.

FreeBSD and Linux are the only OS where TRIM over RAID works, afaik.

good to know, and i would not have known since you'll never catch me running motherboard fakeraid anyway

Well even if you run in AHCI or IDE mode on the Intel controller, you wouldn't have TRIM capability if you ran Windows 7 with Intel drivers prior to the 9.6 version where they added the TRIM support. Same for people running AMD and other chipsets, but there is no update for them which gives those vendor specific drivers TRIM support yet. So many AMD users may have installed AMD chipset driver along with the CD that came with the motherboard, and won't have TRIM capability, and blame the AMD SATA controller for their degraded SSD performance.

Honestly, it is kind of appalling to see that chipset vendors like AMD, but also others like Silicon Image and JMicron, do not release TRIM-capable chipset drivers. If they don't, they likely shouldn't ship a driver at all; it makes little sense for the users since it likely adds zero benefit over the standard Microsoft AHCI/IDE drivers; which should work on any IDE/AHCI compliant hardware.

As soon as you set the controller to RAID in the system BIOS, the hardware will not register as 'IDE' controller anymore, but rather as SCSI controller, which is the interface used for RAID cards. Thus, then the Microsoft drivers won't handle this type of device, and proprietary drivers need to be installed to service the SCSI device. So hence you got chipset 'IDE' drivers, which later evolved to full IDE/AHCI/RAID drivers like Intel; which in terms of features are quite decent, but reliability is lacking.