Conclusion

Announcement: Despite the circumstance that the rating of a product is based on as many objective facts as possible there are factors which can have an influence on a rating after publication. Every autor may perceive data differently over time whereas one possible reason for example is a deeper background knowledge or understanding of certain processes. Certain unforseen market conditions as well as changes have the potential to render a descision made at a certain point in time obsolete.

There is absolutely no doubt, that when it comes to sequential throughput rates, the RevoDrive 350 480 GB is the new king of the hill. During our tests we measured well more than 1.8 Gigabyte per second regarding sequential read as well as sequential write throughput performance. Therefore this drive would be a great choice in video or digital audio workstation, since large files need to be processed in this case. A closer look at random throughput rates shows the achilles heel of the RevoDrive 350 480 Gigabyte. It's not that the drive is slow, but we would have expected more from a PCI-Express card with a total of four controllers on top of it. In case of random read we measured about 107'000 IOPS and for random write there are almost 93'000 IOPS. These values are acutally a little bit above results gathered from todays fastest single controller drives.

As we already mention on the first page of this review the 480 Gigabyte version of the RevoDrive 350 is basically built upon four single 120 Gigabyte SSDs, which means that in an ideal world we would be getting four times the performance of a single 120 Gigabyte SSD with SF-2282 controller. In case of the 960 Gigabyte version of the RevoDrive 350 there are four single 240 Gigabyte SSDs being used. Especially when it comes to random read performance the 240 Gigabyte units are quicker, which is why the RevoDrive 350 with 480 Gigabyte capacity is not the fastest PCI-Express SSD from OCZ.

The recommendation for this drive is actually a two edged sword. Since sequential throughput rates are simply mindblowing the drive can be recommended especially for video or audio editing workstations or basically any environment that benefits from exceptionally high sequential rates. On the other hand there are the random results which we would have expected to be higher. Nevertheless we're "complaining on a very high" level since an enduser won't notice a difference between having 100'000 IOPS at his disposal or 150'000 IOPS. In the end it's more about the feeling of having owning a drive that is simply faster than any other drive in any possible scenario, which is not the case.

In terms of pricing: the RevoDrive have never been cheap and the RevoDrive 350 is no exception. The 240 Gigabyte model features an MSRP of 529.99 USD, the 480 Gigabyte drive sells for 829.99 US-Dollar (MSRP) and the 960 Gigabyte derivate is going to set you back a whopping 1'299 US-Dollar. Therefore this drive is not just a premium product it also features a premium price and you might only buy it if it brings you a specific benefit, such as in workstations, where saving time means making money.