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

Taking a first look at the RevoDrive Hybrid, we can essentially see a Toshiba 1TB 2.5″ hard drive bolted to a large PCB daughter board. The large daughter board is then attached to the main PCB which sits on a PCI-Express x4 interface.

The drive being PCI-Express based sits comfortably in one PCI expansion lane, though the added daughter board and attached hard drive does extend things out a bit, but not marjorly.

The main part of the drive has a small, passive heatsink covering the OCZ RAID controller. Past products from OCZ would have seen a controller sported by LSI, though on this product they have taken a different route which enables further functionality including TRIM and SMART monitoring due to the Virtualized Controller Architecture 2.0 layer.

On the rear of the card, we can find 12 OCZ branded 25nm asynchronous flash memory chips. Sadly not a lot is known about OCZ’s own IC’s but hopefully they should prove to be an asset to OCZ products.

The RevoDrive Hybrid has three major parts to it. The first is the main PCI-Express card which sits at the back, on top of this is a daughter board which attaches to the main PCB. Attached to the daughter board is the Toshiba 1TB 2.5 hard drive.

Once we have detached all three tiers of the RevoDrive Hybrid, we were able to see things a little more clearly. We find two SandForce SF-2281 controllers, which control each bank of memory.

Once the top two tiers had been removed, it allowed us to see the other memory banks available, once again with OCZ branded 25nm asynchronous memory.

In typical OCZ RevoDrive fashion, we find a light show on the end of the board. These status lights can be helpful at times, but for the most part; are simply added for a cool lighting effect