Revodrive

You will probably regret it. A single sandforce drive will give similar performance for about $100 less. And the Intel G3s haven't come out yet.
 
Sandforce won't give good performance on anything but benchmarks that write all 0's
You'll see ~100MB/s reads/writes on anything that isn't highly compressible.
 
Sandforce is about 5% faster than Indilinx on average, which is very fast to begin with. The perceptible difference between RAIDed SSDs (like the Revodrive) and single drives is near zero.
 
i knew i shouldn't say anything.

A single sandforce drive will give similar performance for about $100 less.
can you please tell me, what product are you talking about, link please?
 
Sandforce is about 5% faster than Indilinx on average, which is very fast to begin with. The perceptible difference between RAIDed SSDs (like the Revodrive) and single drives is near zero.
Could you backup those claims?

Did you compare IOps performance between Sandforce and Indilinx? If so you should know that Indilinx is way slower in random I/O operations than any other SSD except Samsung/JMicron. The Indilinx does about 7-9MB/s random writes while Intel does about 10 times that much and Sandforce even 2 times that of the Intel. So 5% difference in real life situations appears much too low.
 
Sorry, I'm only talking about real-world performance (aka daily use). Yes the read and write and IOPS for RAIDed drives and sandforce drives in general are insanely high, and they do provide huge increases in some applications, but for normal use you will barely feel a difference. The 5% difference i gave between Indilinx and Sandforce was a little low--according to this Anandtech review it's more like 7-15% difference. Still basically negligible.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3667/oczs-agility-2-reviewed-the-first-sf1200-with-mp-firmware/7

Also, here's a youtube video comparing Indilinx and Sandforce booting in RAID. You can see that the difference really isn't worth the extra money, the uploader even says that himself in the description.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhRCLv4wvvs

I'm not trying to discredit newer drives or RAID. I'm just saying that most people will probably be happier spending less money for comparable performance.
 
Don't put too much trust in those PCMark benchmarks. It's fun too watch but the reality is often much more complex. Benchmarking SSDs is even harder and requires serious skills.

Anyway, i do agree that the difference between SSDs may be small since you already made the big leap from low IOps storage to high IOps storage; compared to HDD. As the I/O becomes less of a bottleneck, other parts of your system will bottleneck instead. Such as your CPU, as windows and many software and I/O + network backends are singlethreaded and thus 25% on a quadcore or 12% on quadcore+hyperthreading could already mean your CPU is limiting your performance for some tasks. But that's still way faster than waiting for the slow HDD.

So yes you can say 'pick the slowest SSD you won't really notice it anyway', but then you can also pick the slowest cpu, the slowest memory, the slowest and so on. A cheap netbook with atom CPU but paired with SSD can be very fast for light tasks and any faster would be a waste.

But some people do more intensive tasks. Even under windows, things like running VMs or other I/O intensive software at the same time. Here you would get much more benefit from going to SandForce/Intel/Micron instead of the slower JMicron/Samsung/Indilinx SSDs; though Indilinx certainly is the best of those three it think, at least in terms of reliability.

Oh and booting is single queue I/O; so RAID wouldn't make any difference here and only make it a tiny fraction slower. Though Windows 7 + Superfetch now read sequentially which would benefit a RAID0. But boot performance is not a target for most RAID setups. Multitasking performance is and other I/O intensive software is.
 
The ADATA S599 is a Sandforce drive, which are good if you write a lot of compressible data. But if much of your data is incompressible, the performance suffers.

Here are my picks for SSDs in various sizes, which will have good performance for all data types, and tend to be reliable and "just work" (the Intels somewhat moreso than the Crucials):

$570 Crucial C300 256GB
$400 Intel X25-M 160GB
$270 Crucial C300 128GB
$200 Intel X25-M 80GB
$140 Crucial C300 64GB
$100 Intel X25-V 40GB

If you want to maintain write performance and endurance as the SSD is filled and written/re-written, use TRIM if you can, and also leave about 20% unallocated space when you first format and partition it. In the latter case, you probably want to choose an SSD one notch higher on my list, since then you are going to reduce capacity to 80% of rated capacity. But that is not necessary, unless you are the type who must always have the best possible performance and/or you are writing a LOT of data to the SSD over its lifetime.
 
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I don't have a clue what Mr Yamaki is whining about. Since you already have an SSD, multiple SSDs in raid 0 are the only logical upgrade, and the revodrive is a fairly decent, if flaky, way to go raid 0. A better option would be to buy a few SSDs and raid them yourself, but that will be more expensive.

I would not suggest upgrading to any single SSD from what you have now; the difference between the G1 and modern 3rd generation drives is still pretty small.
 
I'm picking up 120gb revodrive this week, I can run some tests and compare it to my vertex2 raid 0
 
I'm personally excited for when OCZ starts making things like photofast's drive which uses a much more powerful raid controller, or better yet maybe someone will make a native PCI-E SSD controller (is that even feasible?).

Don't get me wrong, the RevoDrive puts quite a bit of performance into a cheap and manageable package, but I can't help but feel leery about the SiI3124 PCI-X to 4 port 3Gbps SATA controller. I know PCI-X bridge chips are cheap but it just doesn't seem like an elegant solution.
 
I'm personally excited for when OCZ starts making things like photofast's drive which uses a much more powerful raid controller, or better yet maybe someone will make a native PCI-E SSD controller (is that even feasible?).

Don't get me wrong, the RevoDrive puts quite a bit of performance into a cheap and manageable package, but I can't help but feel leery about the SiI3124 PCI-X to 4 port 3Gbps SATA controller. I know PCI-X bridge chips are cheap but it just doesn't seem like an elegant solution.

I don't like bridge chips too, but it looks like this "fakeRAID" solution does allow TRIM on FreeBSD. Been following a discussion on the FreeBSD forum, and one of the positive sides of Silicon Image is that is can be used as normal AHCI SATA controller under FreeBSD. If i'm right you'll see two disks (ada0 and ada1) - as there are two Sandforce controllers on the board. Both should be TRIM-capable.

Of course, Windows users probably never will be able to use this product in combination with TRIM; Silicon Image likely won't release proper drivers.
 
got my revodrive 120gb today, hopefully I have some time over the weekend to play with it. If you want to see some specific test/etc let me know.

here's what i have to play with
ocz vertex 1 120gb
ocz vertex 2 120gb x3
ocz revodrive 120gb
 
got my revodrive 120gb today, hopefully I have some time over the weekend to play with it. If you want to see some specific test/etc let me know.

AS-SSD, and CrystalDiskMark with the largest file size chosen.
 
axan, if possible it would be very interesting to see if TRIM works on your device on FreeBSD using my ZFSguru LiveCD. If it works, this would be very useful to reset the performance of your Revodrive. In essence performing a secure erase.

1) First benchmark the disk over and over with CrystalDiskMark/AS SSD until you start seeing some performance degradation. See if you can see dips in the HDtune output. If so continue to next step.
2) Boot the ZFSguru livecd, login as root and type 'ifconfig' to check your IP address (check for "inet x.x.x.x").
3) Navigate the web-interface (http://<IP>) and go to Disks page, select your disk and you should see formatting options.
4) Format the disk with either GPT or geom (you have to give it a name) and make sure to select the "secure erase" checkbox. This should only take a number of seconds depending on how full your SSD is (not directly your filesystem).
5) Now reboot and do benchmarks again to see if performance is restored.

If it works, you may just have an easy way to do secure erase on that device; as i would assume you wouldn't be able to with HDDerase.exe.
Just a reminder, a secure erase does mean you destroy anything on your Revodrive! So all data should be considered lost. That doesn't mean all data is gone, though.

Edit: i just realise that you need siis driver for this to work, so livecd may not work. Tell me if you want to hear about USB/ZFS-on-root options, they require a little more work, but would allow you to enable the new siis driver (Silicon Image) which allows you to use TRIM on this device.

Cheers!
 
i wouldnt mess with this. it is dead end tech. there is no trim, no firmware upgrades, and no forward compatibility. also, it being raided you are going to have to worry about stability. this is NOT a single device.
 
No SSD is a single device; they are all RAIDed internally already. Only CompactFlash and USB sticks are single channel. Real SSDs are already RAIDed 10 times (Intel) - 8 times (Micron) - 4 times (Indilinx).
 
being 'raided' internally by the controller of the ssd itself. to my knowledge the revodrive, etc, are two raided ssd controllers. so you have one controller with X amount of channels, then another controller with X amount of channels, raided together. that is where the problem arises.
 
2 raided Sandforce controllers with each 8 channels; that means you need at least a queue depth of 16 (2x8) to begin to saturate the random reads this SSD is capable of.

Thus it would perform roughly the same as 1 SSD with 16 channels; assuming the SATA interface is no bottleneck.

So RAIDing the Sandforce shouldn't be a problem at all; especially if that still allows passing TRIM. But i don't think you can expect Windows to get this support. At least not anytime soon.
 
got my revodrive 120gb today, hopefully I have some time over the weekend to play with it. If you want to see some specific test/etc let me know.

here's what i have to play with
ocz vertex 1 120gb
ocz vertex 2 120gb x3
ocz revodrive 120gb

booting.
 
Here are some benchmarks of the RevoDrive, sorry it took me so long but I've been kinda swamped

CrystalDiskMark_OCZ-RevoDrive%20120GB.PNG
OCZ_RevoDrive120GB_ATTO.PNG


OCZ_RevoDrive120GB_HDTune_Benchmark_SiImage_.png
OCZ_RevoDrive120GB_Write_HDTune_Benchmark_SiImage_.png


OCZ_RevoDrive120GB_HDTune_Random_Access_SiImage_.png
OCZ_RevoDrive120GB_HDTune_Random_Access_Write_SiImage_.png


as-ssd-bench%20SiImage%20%20SCSI%20Di%2010.5.2010%206-37-05%20PM.png
as-copy-bench%20SiImage%20%20SCSI%20Di%2010.5.2010%206-42-28%20PM.png


Coming up, comparison to single vertex 1, vertex2 and raid 0 of 2 and 3 vertex2s
 
For comparison, here is AS-SSD for a single Crucial C300 256GB SSD. From the AS-SSD author's website.

C300amd.png
 
axan, did you think about testing with FreeBSD? Would love to see how it performs under advanced software RAID. You also get the opportunity to secure erase them, which is not possible with any other tool that i'm aware of.
 
do you have some bootable live cd/usb freebsd with the right drivers? or do i have to build 1 ?
 
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