OCZ Revodrive; worth it?

Question

Traditional SSDs seem to have stabilized at up to ~200 mb/s read and ~150 mb/s write.

The OCZ Revodrives (PCIe solid state hard drives) are now in the $200 for 50gb of disk space (plenty for me, and I paid more than that for my first SSD back when they started pulling ahead of the platter drives), and are claiming 540 mb/s read | 450 mb/s write speeds.

Does anyone have experience with these? How do you find out if your mobo can boot from a PCIe slot? Can most of them, or should I be triple-checking BIOS/docs? Assuming you've got one set up, how does it compare to a regular SSD? Is it as big a leap in performance from a SATA SSD to a PCIe as it was from a 7200rpm to an SSD? Is it at least worth the money?

Answer 1

If your motherboard can boot from an external RAID card (they all can) then it can boot from this device. It presents a storage adapter AND storage to the motherboard, a situation that's been well handled for a very long time now.

As for performance, it all depends on what you're doing with it. With 6G SAS now coming online, the top tier of SAS SSD drives can now blow past the 200mb/s barriers. However, if your motherboard only has 3G SATA ports, this PCIe solution should be markedly faster than 3G SATA. The Anandtech article on these guys is very encouraging, but always test with real loads before committing. For storage-intensive tasks it'll probably do really good, for general purpose computing, you may not notice much improvement.

Should be. Always test to be certain. It's the only way to be sure that it'll be worth your money. Check the return policy of where you bought it, and make sure you can get your testing done before it has to go back.