With the RevoDrive Hybrid, OCZ has another PCI Express SSD in their portfolio, but this time RevoDrive comes with an additional 1 Terabyte 2.5 inch HDD on top. Using a caching software the manufacturer wants to combine the advantages of both worlds. How good this all works, that's what we're going to reveal on the following pages.

Specifications / Delivery

Model	OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid 120 Gigabyte SSD, 1 Terabyte HDD
Capacity	120 Gigabyte SSD, 1 Terabyte HDD (2.5'')
Memory	NAND Flash, Hard drive
Technology	synchronous Micron NAND, 25nm (M2501064T048AX21)
Throughput	up to 910 MB/s reading, up to 810 MB/s writing Random Read IOPS: 65'000 Random Write IOPS: 120'000
Power Consumption	Idle: 8.1 Watt Load: 10 Watt
MTBF	600'000 hours
Accesstime (read)	< 0.1 ms
Software	Dataplex Caching Software
Warranty	3 Years

Behind the scenes

The RevoDrive Hybrid with 120 Gigabyte NAND flash memory and a 1 Terabyte hard drive comes with two SandForce SF-2281 controllers. In principle the RevoDrive Hybrid is based on two individual SandForce SF-2281 SSDs with 60 Gigabyte capacity. Like the RevoDrive 3 the Hybrid 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 RevoDrive Hybrid. This means that the two SF-2281 controllers get a full 2 Gigabyte/sec of raw bandwidth.

To combine the best of both worlds - SSD and HDD - a caching software is being needed. In the box you find a licence key for the Dataplex caching software. In order to the the software you have to register your key on the OCZ Website. Once this is done you get a download link. As soon as you've downloaded the software you can start setting up the RevoDrive Hybrid. You need to perform a clean install of Windows 7 on the Hybrids hard drive. Therefore the appropriate driver needs to be fed to the operating system during the installation process. Once the installation has finished you can install the Dataplex software. This will make a process run in the background which analyzes usage patterns and saves files appropriately to get maximum performance.

VCA 2.0

Like the RevoDrive 3 the Hybrid also comes with a SAS bridge chip. Using this chip OCZ has been able to implement 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 implement this. A worst case scenario 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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