OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid 1TB PCI-Express Solid State Drive Review

Right throughout the testing process, its clear as day that the RevoDrive Hybrid does as it says on the tin by harnessing the power of 128GB of RAW MLC flash in a configuration with the two Sandforce controllers that effectively gives 128Gb of RAID0 storage infront of the 1TB capacity. Our testing gave us results that superseded other hybrid options by far with speeds that you would normally expect from a single 6Gbps SSD in its own right.

With the RevoDrive Hybrid, as with everything, there are a set of pros and cons and first and foremost is the price. Even though its been on the market a little while now, its still £319.99 and in respect to buying a 1TB hard drive and a SSD cache drive, it is a considerable amount more. What you have to understand though is that by harnessing the drive and flash in this fashion onto the PCI-e lanes, the speed that you will get once setup is going to be far greater than any other caching option on the market today. Another slight downside is that as with most caching options available at this present moment, operation is not a simple plug-and-play affair. The Dataplex software that comes bundled with the drive needs to be installed within  Windows and this also means that the 1TB drive has to be set as your boot drive otherwise it will use what ever your current boot drive is instead. This however for some will give them the chance down memory lane to see how fast solid state drives are in relation to mechanical ones for boot devices as I clearly found out.

With the Dataplex software installed, the first boot into Windows was significantly faster and as our results showed in HD Tach, things just kept getting faster as commonly used files get cached onto the flash memory for what seems like instant access.

So where do I see this drive going? Well its clear to say that as we’ve seen as of recent months, SSD caching is certainly the way forward for now in order to get the balance between speed and capacity. The downside however that some options like this one do still come at a price. Good money however is something that you should expect to pay, and for some users out there, that is exactly what they will do do. If you want the best you will go all out to get it. We do have to take into account that this is the first product of its type and we may even find that could be a one-hit wonder.

Would I buy the RevoDrive Hybrid? Well for what you’re getting it can be taken in two directions. for a new concept and for the performance that is on offer part of me would buy it, but for now I’d rather stick to pure SSDs in a RAID array for the speed factor and a separate storage drive on the side for my high capacity needs. I will however give this drive our Extreme Performance award.