Revodrive and practical applications

[Dmitri]

Most of the reviews for this product I've read seem written by performance enthusiasts who love the speed but talk little about the real world performance.

I'm thinking of buying a low capacity Revodrive as somewhere to store large uncompressed video files, photoshop scratch disk - generally large files I'm currently working on (i often have PSDs in the 500mb - 1gig range).

Looking to replace my current 4 drive raid 0 since I've run out of SATA ports on my MB and between investing in a decent RAID controller card and the Revo, I'd rather go for the quieter SSD.

What sort of life expectancy can I expect from the drive? Do I need to clean format it every few weeks to restore performance? I don't plan on putting any permanent files on it, no OS. Like I say, just files I'm currently working on to maximize performance.

 

[john4200]

I would not risk purchasing anything from OCZ.

How much space do you need?

 

[Blue Fox]

Get the RAID controller and a few SSDs. Cheaper and better.

 

[Dmitri]

Get the RAID controller and a few SSDs. Cheaper and better.

Cheaper than a single 50gb Revodrive? I'll have to do some research. I can see a RAID controller card being cheaper coupled with my existing SATA drives, but a "few SSDS"? Doesn't having SSDs in raid negate the performance degradation question I had since TRIM is then disabled? The Revodrive is the same except I don't need to bother with the expensive RAID controller card..

I would not risk purchasing anything from OCZ.

How much space do you need?

Not much, it's just for working files where I'm doing a great deal of read\writes.

 

[Burner27]

You lose TRIM on the RevoDrive as well. But realize this, if one drive fails on the RevoDrive, you have to RMA the unit. If one drive fails in a RAID array comprised of several SSDs, you can just replace the SSDs.

 

[john4200]

If you are looking for 50+ GB of scratch space with decent sequential write speed, your best bet is probably a 64GB Samsung 470. It has the fastest sequential write speed of 64GB SSDs. If you need more space or more speed, you could RAID 0 up to three of them with ICHR RAID. Beyond three, you would not see much increase in speed on ICHR.

 

[Blue Fox]

The Revodrive is essentially a RAID controller with a few SSDs attached to it minus the cables. On the PCB itself, you can see the RAID chip and multiple NAND controllers. It is no different than having a regular RAID controller with some SSDs attached to it except for cost (it's more expensive), performance (you can get better performing SSDs for the same or lower price), and it being the single point of failure.