With the RevoDrive 3 X2, OCZ shows the remake of the their very successful PCI-Express SSD for the enthusiast market. The main difference to the predecessor concerns the controller: they make now use of the SF-2281 which is quite a lot faster than its predecessor.

Specifications / Delivery

Model	OCZ RevoDrive 3 X2 480 GByte
Capacity	480 GByte
Memory	synchronous NAND Flash
Technology	4 x SandForce SF-2281
Throughput	up to 1'500 MB/s reading, up to 1'225 MB/s writing
Accesstime (read)	< 0.1 ms
Life expectance	1'000'000 hours (MTBF)
Acoustics	no noise
Warranty	3 Years

Behind the scene of the Revo 3

The RevoDrive 3 X2 with 480 Gigabyte NAND flash comes with no less than four SandForce SF-2281 controllers. In principle the RevoDrive 3 X2 is based on four individual SandForce SF-2281 SSD with 120 Gigabyte. Compared to the predecessor, the Revo 3 now comes with an improved design. Therefore it doesn't feature the SATA-to-PCI-X-to-PCIe chain OCZ has actually put a 4-port 6 Gbps SATA-to-PCI-e-x4 bridge chip onto the PCB of the Revo 3. This means that the four SF-2281 controllers get a full 2 Gigabyte/sec of raw bandwidth.

VCA 2.0

Comared to the predecessor there are even more improvements. The SAS bridge chip OCZ makes use of now also offer hardware support for TRIM. Futhermore it is also possible to read out SMART data. Both, TRIM as well as SMART wasn't supported the Revo 2. A special agreement with the manufacturer of the bridge chip allowed OCZ to change the firmware that it now supports the features we've just mentioned. But still there is a downside: although the Revo 3 supports TRIM, Windows 7 doesn't. In fact Windows 7 doesn't support SCSI unmap which is the SCSI-equivalent to SATA-TRIM. OCZ told us that they're working together with Microsoft in order to address this issue but it will take some time until Microsoft will officially address this. The worst case could be that it will take until the realease of Windows 8 until SCSI unmap is supported with Windows.

Page 1 - Introduction / Specs	Page 7 - Random read KByte/s
Page 2 - Impressions	Page 8 - Sequential write ops
Page 3 - How do we test?	Page 9 - Sequential read ops
Page 4 - Sequential write KByte/s	Page 10 - Random write ops
Page 5 - Sequential read KByte/s	Page 11 - Random read ops
Page 6 - Random write KByte/s	Page 12 - Conclusion

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