OCZ Couples SSD, Mechanical Storage On a PCIe Card

J. Dzhugashvili writes "We've seen some solid-state drives on PCI Express cards before, but OCZ's RevoDrive Hybrid may very well be the first solution to combine solid-state storage and a mechanical hard drive on a single PCI Express x4 card. Using Dataplex caching software from Nvelo, the RevoDrive Hybrid uses its solid-state component (a RAID 0 array of SandForce-based SSDs) as a cache for an onboard mechanical hard drive. The caching scheme is reportedly so effective that "a 5,400-RPM drive can be used without sacrificing much performance," according to The Tech Report's coverage. OCZ hasn't hashed out all of the details yet, but it expects the RevoDrive Hybrid to start at $350 this July. The base configuration should couple 60GB of solid-state storage with a 500GB mechanical drive."

Reminds me of hardcards

[yuhong]

Do anyone remember the old ISA hardcards?

Not new

[Anonymous Coward]

There are at the very least two other solutions that do the same thing, that were out there before this one:

HighPoint RocketHybrid: exactly the same, an expansion card with connectors for one ssd and one hdd.

Intel Smart Response Technology: Software on top of the Z68 chipset that uses an SSD of up to 60GB as cache for a different drive or raid.

Garbage Brand

[Anonymous Coward]

OCZ just recently swapped their NAND for cheaper, denser, slower NAND. They didn't even change the model #. When enough complaints came in, they were forced to RMA everyone's drives or face a bait&switch lawsuit.

Uncle Joe reports... Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

> J. Dzhugashvili writes

That's pretty offensive for a large part of the world population!

Just for the record: Josif (Vissarionovich) Dzhugashvili was the birth name of Stalin, the soviet communist dictator, who was more interested in sending people to the Gulags for hard labor, to give them bad memories, rather than hard drives combined with memory chips. Around 25 million did not return, in total.

Wonder if an austrian painter, Adolphus Shicklgruber will report next time about the new USB 4.0 draft standard or so.

Re:I've been waiting for these

[im_thatoneguy]

I think ReadyDrive has failed mostly because it was left to the drive controller to handle the caching.

My understanding is that with Win8 they're moving the logic to the OS and divorcing the hardware from the equation freeing you to buy any old spinning medium and any old fast SSD/Raid to act as your cache.

I like this idea since I can 'upgrade' my existing drives to ReadyDrive by just buying a SSD and I can still have my multiple disks but just the one SSD between them.

Re:Garbage Brand

[the_jone]

I don't know if they're a garbage brand, but OP is certainly right. You can read OCZ's own announcement [ocztechnologyforum.com], or read Anandtech's analysis [anandtech.com] in their Vertex 3 review. Storagereview did a comparison [storagereview.com] of the 32nm and 24nm Vertex 2's which is also worth a read. .

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:I've been waiting for these

[deroby]

I beg to differ.
I've been using one since september last year and it beats the crap out of the standard HDD. In my team we're all having pretty much the same machine with the same software installed. Because I do a lot of database stuff and also like to have my music collection and some games to carry around I got fed up with the limited capacity of the standard drive and out of frustration bought my own 500Gb Momentus XT. The thing boots *much* faster than all the other machines around me. Outlook takes seconds to start, it takes about a minute for my neighbour. Same for Visual studio.

There's plenty of Youtube vids around that show the impact of the Momentus XT and I can only confirm them. more cache might have been better, but 4Gb sure does a great job !

Re:Love for OCZ

[dbIII]

I tried to mirror a vertex1 and 2 - they use different types of memory and the 240GB vertex2 drives are actually quite a few GB smaller and unfortunately the data I was going to put on there would thus no longer fit. I ended up striping the things but it took three attempts to get a stripe size with performance equal to or better than a single drive. Attempt 1 and 2 were dog slow with writes and not good for reads, third attempt outperformed both single drives for reads and isn't too bad for writes The moral of the story is the obvious one of using identical drives, but at the time of the original drive getting two of them would have been a bit too expensive.