News OCZ RevoDrive X2 uses 4 SSDs in RAID

The new OCZ RevoDrive X2 is a PCI Express-based SSD with impressive performance.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2010/10/29/ocz-revodrive-x2-uses-4-ssds-in-raid/1

 

Surely this is going to end up with a similar poor review to the original, apart from it being faster and even more costly. I got the impression that a drive with no TRIM support because of the RAID configuration was a a major downer already?

Revodrive Review

 

If you're considering an SSD RAID, that implies you're expecting large bursts of uncompressed data to arrive from somewhere. If that premise is correct, I can see a way around the TRIM problem during large sequential writes - configure the Sandforce controller to keep acquiring and compressing data until it has an entire block worth of pages to write, allowing it to skip the read-modify-overwrite protocol and just do an overwrite instead. Or am I way off base here?

 

Exactly. Without Trim, whether it be onboard or M$ pulling their finger out with an update for Win7 what's the point?

 

SF controllers don't suffer that much without TRIM, and background garbage collection was sufficient. IIRC AnandTech did an article proving this.

 

No TRIM, I'm not interested.

 

Yeah I like a nice piece of trim too...........

 

I think SandForce does garbage collection on its own, but I'd still like to see a bit of TRIM anyway. Why's it so hard to make a RAID controller that can pass on the command?!

 

740 MB/s or 1.02 GB/s is nothing special. In fact it is rather pathetic result when compared to other PCI-Ex SSDs like for example GM-PowerDrive-LSI. True it is more expensive at 1100 Euro for 240 GB or something around that, but it offers hardware RAID setup & support (0/1/10(1E)5/6/50/60). You get 1500R/1400W MB straight out of the box. Just like OCZ product it is purely enthusiast oriented. And for many enthusiast $$$ are not an issue. They want the best/fastest/powerful/etc.. and so on... Why would you want to pick RevoDrive over GM-PD-LSI?

I think that PCI-Ex based SSDs are in general misguided. In servers in particular slots on motherboard are usually a premium thing, you can't afford to waste them. In home, as most users don't waste time on quad-SLI or something like that you can plug one PCI-Ex SSD, but it is very controversial investment. Better way is to buy hardware RAID card (like for example Areca 1261ML). Connect 4 SSDs in RAID 0 for 1200MB/s+ transfers and lighting speed boot drive (and if you expand on-board cache to 2GB you will get even better results) or 4/8/12/16 SSDs in RAID10/6 for best of both worlds (speed and fault tolerance). It is more expensive solution than one PCI-Ex SSD in short term, but you can easily expand size of storage space later with new SSDs, you won't lose data if you go for RAID10/5/6. RevoDrive falls short when compared to such setup.

And the most funny thing is that with older (and much cheaper) Indilinx/Barefoot SSDs you won't be too far off from results achieved by SF based SSDs. Hardware RAID0/10 on SSDs is bloody fast!

 

but for normal use 1 ssd is plenty be it an c300 SD-1200 or M225 type ssds

raid on ssd is only useful for high data rate usage or server loads and only with Sf-1200 ssds as gc works well when trim is not around, I never recommend raid with ssds under normal/gamer/workstation use (unless your doing loads that required high data rate or server type loads that that stress an single ssd)

 

I thought Intel introduced Trim to SSD's in raid with their High Speed SATA driver in may.

 

only operates in single disk mode only (when up-to-date drives are used in SATA, ahci or raid mode with an single disk) you can have 1 ssd and 2x hdds in raid, the ssd would still have trim support as long as you do not use 2x ssd in raid.

 

This sort of thing is extremely nice as your boot and programs drive, and as a place to put your scratch file. The improvement in performance is absolutely mindblowing.

No, it's not worth it for a gaming rig, which is why I question Bit Tech's interest.

 

Shame it's OCZ that makes this cos it will be flaky and the support terrible if it's anything like it's other products...