Yay mine came today I have been curious about these things since they launched. Sadly £270 for an SSD is madness, so I just bought a Corsair X32 and had done for a while. Either way they (the Revodrive) can be had right now from Scan as a refurb for £44ish with free shipping (on Ebay). Now I've read many conflicting reports about this drive. Apparently it doesn't support TRIM or have any garbage collection. However, according to OCZ Sandforce drives perform garbage collection natively so there is hope. Either way I will be keeping a close eye on performance. So I ordered my drive yesterday. Imagine my (pleasant) surprise when I got an email from DPD telling me they had collected my drive that day and would be delivering it today. Not only that but I got to watch my driver do his deliveries in realtime and followed him right up until he was in the street next to ours, then I went out and guided him in. After unpacking I was again pleasantly surprised that the box was original and the drive was infact shrink sealed. The box itself is made from very thick, heavy cardboard. What's nice is that for £44 it feels like you are unboxing an item that costs £270, rather than a £44 one. Delving a little further the box has a drawer inside that slides open. Inside this is the drive, packed in a nice bit of dense foam. The drive was sealed inside the static bag. Now that means that it either - 1. Had never been opened or 2. Had been resealed. Looking at the drive though? to me this looks brand new. Now I don't know if OCZ clean drives to make them look new but this thing certainly looked like it had never been touched. Oddly enough my 'refurbished' Corsair H100 was the same. It didn't even have any marks in it from screws going into the radiator which means they either repainted it or just sold them off cheap because they had them lying around but didn't want to offer a full warranty. Either way i was very happy with the condition of the drive So there it is in all its glory. Installation was pretty painless, given I had already made room for it by moving my GPUs around. I then removed my existing SSD. And all of my data drives. I always do that before installing Windows as it has a bad habit of spreading itself around and putting the boot partitions on other drives. I noticed there wasn't a driver CD with the Revo which led me to conclude that it didn't need one. Sadly I was wrong. It does need one, and Windows 8 won't see the drive until you load the driver for the RAID controller (available on their website) from a USB stick. Windows didn't take very long at all to install, and here it is all set up. Time for ATTO. And the drive absolutely flies. Come to Crystal however and the story isn't quite the same. However, it's still very impressive for a £44 SSD. To conclude.. Positives. It's cheap, it's fast. Yes you can get a 120gb SSD that's probably as fast as this by going SATA III, but that will cost you a darn sight more than £44 delivered. It's PCIE, leaving more SATA channels for data drives. It looks good, and has LEDs on (see pic). Good ATTO performance. Negatives. It's PCIE and needs to go in a X4 slot. This means you will need a X4 slot free, which usually means a full length slot. This means that MATX boards mostly won't work with this unless they offer Crossfire or SLI support. Questionable garbage collection/TRIM. No drivers supplied leaving you to go off and find them. Poor Crystal performance. Overall this is a bit of a no brainer if you have a X4+ PCIE slot going spare.
I saw this on the scan website today, I would be curious how well the drive maintains its performance.
Tempting, very tempting.. Until I looked at the Revo3. Yes the price is high, but compared to 380 for the non refurbished.. I wish i had that money.. 240gb, 200K IOPS, 1500MB/s write.. the drewl! I have the old type "I love my SSD" somewhere, looks better than now.
This is a great deal. Scan is really coming through with these 'refurbished' models, most of them are probably brand new. The only thing I would love to but sort of... put myself off is with those Corsair AIO coolers they've got going. A H80 for £40? Sounds too tasty to be possible.
regret rectified. Saw they are still on there so I bought one. I was looking at a shonky Sandisk Pulse for more than this. Still, I haven't found out what warranty Scan are doing with it. Or OCZ, whatever. P.s. Thanks for sharing.
According to Ebay a year. I got mine from their Ebay outlet as it offered free shipping so it was £44 all in.. Yeah, you're not going to beat the performance of the Revo for £44 with any drive. I just looked over B-T's SSD group test and the Revo outperforms quite a few of the drives they tested.. You're basically looking at Samsung 820 128gb performance for less than half the price. Nice thing about it is it frees up the 80GB Intel drive I bought so I can use that for heavy games. Might speed up the loading a bit
yeah. It seems I jumped the gun and that I may have to use it as my SSD in my main PC. Then I can use the Crucial m4 I have in my server for host cache. Shame as I wanted to use it in esxi but it seems I'll be lucky to get it to work... Edit: I might chicken out tomorrow actually and mail them to change to Samsung drive... Edit2: I did chicken out and went for 64gb drive as 120gb is overkill for my needs.
may just plug it in and see what happens... but I can't see any stories online to say it works. TBH I need to do a new windows installation at some point soon anyway.
According to wikipedia a PCI-E x1 slot has approx 500MB/s bandwidth, so if I cut the end of the slot out then I am only loosing a little of the top of the read speed quoted of 540MB/s, or are there any other factors to consider?
I really don't know. It may need the extra pins for power? no idea. I spent a while Googling and couldn't find any information on any one putting one in there.. I wouldn't cut your socket though. I would get an extension and cut that. Something like this.. http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/1X-X1-PCI...uting_CablesConnectors_RL&hash=item3a84512df4 Rather than defacing your motherboard..
Good idea getting the adapter. I believe the first few pins before the gap are the power pins, and the rest are PCI-e channels. For example I once cut 15 channels off an old graphics card with a hacksaw and put it in the single channel sock and it worked fine, so it will be compatible, Im just not sure what the "realistic" top speed of a single lane PCIe is.
