OCZ RevoDrive 120GB PCI-E Solid State Drive Review

In quite a few situations, solid state drives have hit a wall. This isn’t necessarily a performance wall because many modern SSDs have the capability to vastly outstrip the bandwidth of a SATA II interface. It is simply getting harder and harder push things to the next level with relatively slow standard interconnect standards like Serial ATA. Even the latest and greatest SATA 6GB/s standard will likely be saturated as SSD capabilities continue to grow at a break neck pace. OCZ understands this and as such as started to seriously look into different interface formats for their higher end mass market products. One such unique example is their latest RevoDrive 120GB drive which uses the PCI-E interface.

While this is not OCZ’s first foray into PCI-E solid state drives, this is the first which comes with a (somewhat) mainstream price tag. The 120GB RevoDrive is powered by a pair of Sandforce SF1200 controllers in RAID-0 which is supposed to lead to substantially increased performance when paired up with the bandwidth provided by a PCI-E interface. Unlike other non-standard SSDs, this one is available at literally every large retailer throughout North America for with a price of about $350 USD. This price actually puts it above higher-end SATA 2 SSDs which sport the same capacity.

Since this is supposed to be a PCI-E interfaced dual SandForce totting beast which is not limited by the SATA bus, it certainly is going to be interesting to see if it can justify any type of price premium over the Vertex 2s of this world. After all, the RevoDrive costs more yet doesn’t have TRIM capabilities and relies on two slower 60GB SF drives in RAID 0 to achieve its desired performance. Considering OCZ’s pedigree in SSD technology, this product has the capability to be a real barn burner.