Take out a loan if you must, because the one thing this OCZ SSD isn't is affordable.
Welcome to a hard drive you can’t afford. At $2,100 for just 480GB of storage, this speed demon is tailor made for those who need the ultimate in hard drive speed, be it server operators or demanding digital content creators. This slab of expensive silicon forgoes the sloth-like SATA 6Gb/s connection entirely, instead jacking directly into your PC via one PCI-E 2.0 x4 slot, delivering exponentially faster throughput.
This is actually not one but two SSD drives mounted to a single PCI-E card. It uses two of the wildly popular SandForce SF-2281 controllers, one per drive, and they’re connected to a single chip that acts as a four-port 6Gb/s SAS to PCI-E x4 bridge. The two drives operate in a RAID configuration, and, unlike the first version of the RevoDrive, now include SMART and TRIM functionality.
At a rather scary $4.38 per GB, this drive works out at around twice the price of the most expensive SATA 6Gb/s drives. For the price you get blistering performance, but not in all tests. Sequential read performance was measured at a record 1,339MB/s, around 2.3 times faster than the closest competitor. Yet 4K read performance was only a couple of per cent faster than the better SATA 6Gb/s drives. However, that lead is once again maintained with the 4K QD16 test, showing just how fast this drive will be in server applications.
If you’ve got money to burn or can justify the ROI to your company’s finance department, the RevoDrive 3 X2 offers a level of performance that was unthinkable just a number of months ago.
Available from OCZ, retailing for $2,100.
APC rating: 9/10 (Editor's Choice)