A Quick Look at OCZ's RevoDrive x2: IBIS Performance without HSDL
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 4, 2010 1:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- SSDs
- OCZ
- RevoDrive
- RevoDrive x2
The Test
Note our AnandTech Storage Bench doesn't always play well with RAIDed drives and thus we weren't able to run it on the RevoDrive x2.
| CPU | Intel Core i7 975 running at 3.33GHz (Turbo & EIST Disabled) |
| Motherboard: | Intel DX58SO (Intel X58) |
| Chipset: | Intel X58 + Marvell SATA 6Gbps PCIe |
| Chipset Drivers: | Intel 9.1.1.1015 + Intel IMSM 8.9 |
| Memory: | Qimonda DDR3-1333 4 x 1GB (7-7-7-20) |
| Video Card: | eVGA GeForce GTX 285 |
| Video Drivers: | NVIDIA ForceWare 190.38 64-bit |
| Desktop Resolution: | 1920 x 1200 |
| OS: | Windows 7 x64 |
PCMark Vantage & SYSMark 2007 Performance
With a four controller SF-1200 setup the real performance advantage won't be seen on most desktop workloads. The RevoDrive x2 is only a few percent faster overall than the original RevoDrive and about 10% faster than a single OCZ Vertex 2.
In the HDD suite the performance advantage is much greater. The RevoDrive x2 is also a bit quicker than the IBIS, perhaps because of the lack of overhead posed by the HSDL interface. There's a 31% performance improvement over the original RevoDrive.
SYSMark shows that most CPU bound desktop workloads won't be impacted by the RevoDrive x2. If your applications are IO bound, expect to see an impact but otherwise there's not much to gain here.
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Chloiber - Thursday, November 4, 2010 - link
IMHO the RevoDrives are useless products. You gain nothing except high sequential bandwith, which most users never need.In REAL world applications, the CPU limits anyway in high IOPS scenarios. You won't see a big gain (if any) if you move from 1 Vertex 2 to 4 Vertex 2 in typical situations.
jonup - Thursday, November 4, 2010 - link
Anand, this is not directly related with the article, but when do you expect the SSD prices to take a big hit? With the next generation of drives around the corner and talks of increased flash manufacturing capacities do you think it is reasonable to by and SSD (regardless of the interface) now simply from a $/GB prospective?Thanks,
J
theagentsmith - Thursday, November 4, 2010 - link
Hey Anandcould you shed light on a annoying bug that's plaguing several but not all owners of Sandforce based SSDs?
It happens when there is not a lot of I/O activity, like when idle or light usage. The drive disappears and you see all the programs opened failing one at a time, until a couple of minutes later windows gives up with a BSOD. As the drive disappeared the kernel can't even write a memory dump, and if you press reset the drive isn't recognized by the BIOS, you have to cycle power to see it working again.
There is also a resume from sleep bug that however it's tolerable as you can use hibernation instead of sleep.
Here there is a topic on Corsair forums about this, they just released a 2.0 firmware but there is no change log and of course no word from Sandforce.
http://forum.corsair.com/forums/showthread.php?t=8...
mark53916 - Thursday, November 4, 2010 - link
How do this and other SSDs handle the container files of encryptedand other virtual disks?
Typically, for best performance the container files should be stored
"densely" on the underlying device, but the space is always in
use.
Shadowmaster625 - Thursday, November 4, 2010 - link
It is not on companies like OCZ to release a faster SSD controller. As I been saying for ages now, it is up to AMD/Intel to release an SSD controller integrated directly into the CPU. It makes as much sense as having an integrated memory controller. It's actually pretty much the same exact thing, except the memory is nonvolatile. It should be in the same form factor to reduce costs (keyed differently of course). ie, a 64GB SSD DIMM would cost half of a 64GB SSD. Perhaps even less.FunBunny2 - Thursday, November 4, 2010 - link
The maths of SSD controllers aren't yet settled, which is why SandForce is different from Intel which is different from Indilinx and so forth. If the SSD controller is in the CPU case, you're stuck with it, unless you buy a new CPU. Hmmm. Frequent, planned, obsolescence; may be Intel will do it, then.larijoona - Thursday, November 4, 2010 - link
Hello,I'm also intrested in seeing some benchmarks of virtual pc performance run from ssd!
jhbodle - Thursday, November 4, 2010 - link
I am not aware of any motherboard-integrated RAID controller that can handle the bandwidth of these 4 Sandforce SSDs. I use 3 X-25E's in RAID0 on the ICH10R, generally regarded as the best integrated RAID controller, and it is maxed at 660MB/sec.So I like this card and am pleased that companies such as OCZ are working on this kind of thing!
Chloiber - Thursday, November 4, 2010 - link
Yep. ICH10R gets to 500-650MB/s - never seen more.It may be, that the ICH10R is connected via a 2GB/s-Bus or whatever, but that's theory. Or, the controller itself cannot handle more (which is a reasonable explanation - if you look at controllers from areca, they also max out at 1-2GB/s - and they are way more expensive).
sonofgodfrey - Thursday, November 4, 2010 - link
The LSI SAS controllers (which are on some server boards) can easily hit 1GB/s with 4 SSDs. Did this with the first generation Intel X-25M drives.