Anyone here use a Revodrive SSD?

[Stridulent]

Thinking about purchasing one. Anyone have any experience with it?

[DeltrusDisc]

Pretty sure Synthaxx might have experience, I think he is thinking about getting one. I think ispano may have one or did as well.

What I've heard is they aren't the best things because they don't support TRIM. =X

[Alienmonkey]

I gotta ask, what is the purpose of buying the Revodrive?

[Stridulent]

I gotta ask, what is the purpose of buying the Revodrive?

My motherboard doesn't support SATA III so I'm thinking a Revodrive might be a way to get otherwise higher speeds.

It's an SSD btw that connects to a PCIe slot instead of SATA port.

[Alienmonkey]

My motherboard doesn't support SATA III so I'm thinking a Revodrive might be a way to get otherwise higher speeds.

It's an SSD btw that connects to a PCIe slot instead of SATA port.

Oh yeah i know what it is but i mean what is the purpose of getting this VERY high priced? What do you intend to put on it?
You know you can not put you're OS on it right?

[Adappy]

You can put your OS on a RevoDrive. I'm not 100% sure every motherboard can boot from a PCI-e drive, but as far as the drive is concerned, you can do it.

[Stridulent]

You can put your OS on a RevoDrive. I'm not 100% sure every motherboard can boot from a PCI-e drive, but as far as the drive is concerned, you can do it.

Yes, you can install your OS on PCIe drives. And I have found a couple of posts online from people with my motherboard that have a revodrive W7 install working fine.

[Alienmonkey]

Yes, you can install your OS on PCIe drives. And I have found a couple of posts online from people with my motherboard that have a revodrive W7 install working fine.

Argh i apologize for my not so wellinformedness on that part, back to my original question, what are you going to do with all that power :P?

[DeltrusDisc]

Unfortunately, i don't. Considered one a few times, but that'd be the next step after normal SSD RAID. I've heard they're good, but at the very far end of luxury and thus price-performance is much worse than even a SATA SSD.

As for booting from one, provided your motherboard doesn't just assume the SATA or IDE (god forbid) ports are the only place a drive can be connected to, you should be fine.

Even if your motherboard doesn't support SATA-3, a normal SSD is STILL a massive speed boost without such massive costs compared to a revodrive. The only time PCI-E SSD's are of real benefit over a SATA SSD is when throughput and bandwidth are the main concerns. FusionIO, a company that makes products similar to the Revodrive, showed one of their "Duo" drives, connected up to 16 servers, 256 Xeons, 16 Graphics Cards, 16 1GB NICs connected to a switch, outputting 1780 uncompressed videos onto a "screen wall".

They also do an "Octal" drive, which is essentially 8 of those strapped together and capable of over 4GB/s throughput! The cost of this is... well, way more than even the most hardened enthusiast would realistically consider.

Now, think. Do you really need that level of performance in your home? Or would the ~200MB/s with ~0.1ms access times (compared to ~18ms on a HDD) be enough? Even if your board is only SATA-2, this is what you could expect. While SATA-3 is nice, it's very much a luxury and something that even i might struggle to find a use for when i do get round to using them.

You're the extreme show-off mod.

But honestly I like HOW you do it. You don't come here going like "LOL MY COMPUTER IS BETTER THAN YOURS LOSERSSSS," you're just like, hey guys, how about I be everyone's test dummy for stuff. ;P

SYNTHAXX! I demand you tell me..... are SSDs really that bad to RAID0? Or is that just OCZ BS'ing people who report their SSDs are dying? Please do a length test on this. ;P <3 <3

[Stridulent]

Unfortunately, i don't. Considered one a few times, but that'd be the next step after normal SSD RAID. I've heard they're good, but at the very far end of luxury and thus price-performance is much worse than even a SATA SSD.

As for booting from one, provided your motherboard doesn't just assume the SATA or IDE (god forbid) ports are the only place a drive can be connected to, you should be fine.

Even if your motherboard doesn't support SATA-3, a normal SSD is STILL a massive speed boost without such massive costs compared to a revodrive. The only time PCI-E SSD's are of real benefit over a SATA SSD is when throughput and bandwidth are the main concerns. FusionIO, a company that makes products similar to the Revodrive, showed one of their "Duo" drives, connected up to 16 servers, 256 Xeons, 16 Graphics Cards, 16 1GB NICs connected to a switch, outputting 1780 uncompressed videos onto a "screen wall".

They also do an "Octal" drive, which is essentially 8 of those strapped together and capable of over 4GB/s throughput! The cost of this is... well, way more than even the most hardened enthusiast would realistically consider.

Now, think. Do you really need that level of performance in your home? Or would the ~200MB/s with ~0.1ms access times (compared to ~18ms on a HDD) be enough? Even if your board is only SATA-2, this is what you could expect. While SATA-3 is nice, it's very much a luxury and something that even i might struggle to find a use for when i do get round to using them.

I see what you mean. I think the Revodrive v1 might have caught my attention when I saw it priced at only $240 on Tigerdirect, which is around the same price as other SATA SSDs at the 110-120GB capacity. Now, the v2 and v3's are ridiculously expensive and definitely way too fast than anyone would need.

I understand that I probably wouldn't need speeds of 400-500MB/s on an at-home gaming system, but I'd like to make a purchase with future-proofing in mind as well.

[Bendder]

Currently, the only negative I see to RAID 0 on SSD's is that you lose TRIM support. GC will help, but TRIM is where its at to restore performance to near-clean levels.

[DeltrusDisc]

@Synthaxx, so I didn't know you lose TRIM support when you RAID0 SSDs. So I've known TRIM is important, but would you mind explaining what TRIM is all about? Like what it does that makes it so important. Thanks love you! :P

[Stridulent]

Also, if something goes wrong, and all you can afford is a system with just 1 PCI-E slot, then you'd have to choose either graphics card, or the drive. It's one reason i'll always keep at least 1 physical drive if i ever do get a PCIE SSD.

I plan on keeping my current SATA HDD 150GB for weekly backup images (through windows 7) from my SSD (whichever I do decide to get) in the case that something does go wrong. I have found articles online that this is possible but I would assume that you would need to change some of the settings in Windows/BIOS back in order to operate on the HDD. Any experience in this, Synthaxx or others?

[georgevonfranken]

@Synthaxx, so I didn't know you lose TRIM support when you RAID0 SSDs. So I've known TRIM is important, but would you mind explaining what TRIM is all about? Like what it does that makes it so important. Thanks love you! :P

Basically when you delete something on a ssd its not actually gone, but with trim it clears the cells so its nice and clean and ready for new data

[Stridulent]

Basically when you delete something on a ssd its not actually gone, but with trim it clears the cells so its nice and clean and ready for new data

Thanks for the insight, George. Do you know anything about the SandForce technology? Doesn't it work towards the same idea as TRIM, but not as well?

[georgevonfranken]

Thanks for the insight, George. Do you know anything about the SandForce technology? Doesn't it work towards the same idea as TRIM, but not as well?

I dont know much about sandforce but my vertex 3 uses sandforce and it also comes with TRIM, so i dont think its meant to replace it maybe just optimize TRIM or something. Looking at sandforce's website i see

Recycler, which intelligently performs garbage collection with the least impact on flash endurance.

[Deleted]

What'd be better, both for security AND to allow us to drop TRIM completely, would be if Windows physically deleted the file.

Standard storage mediums only have two commands. Write, and Read. Operating Systems however cannot control where a 'Write' is performed on a SSD, and furthermore, a SSD cannot write to a sector without running an 'Erase' command on that sector. The command that TRIM implements. Performing a 'write' to an 'deleted' sector still would not resolve the need for TRIM.

[Deleted]

True, but to expand on the quote, it would no doubt be possible to develop the hardware and firmware for the drives to work with this too.

Sure its possible to develop the interface required to support it. Fundamentally thats all the problem really is; theres just no controller level support as the controller needs to pass on and itself understand the command.

[Cyanotical]

Even if your motherboard doesn't support SATA-3, a normal SSD is STILL a massive speed boost without such massive costs compared to a revodrive. The only time PCI-E SSD's are of real benefit over a SATA SSD is when throughput and bandwidth are the main concerns. FusionIO, a company that makes products similar to the Revodrive, showed one of their "Duo" drives, connected up to 16 servers, 256 Xeons, 16 Graphics Cards, 16 1GB NICs connected to a switch, outputting 1780 uncompressed videos onto a "screen wall".

They also do an "Octal" drive, which is essentially 8 of those strapped together and capable of over 4GB/s throughput! The cost of this is... well, way more than even the most hardened enthusiast would realistically consider.

the difference between OCZ Revodrives and Fusion-IO is target market, Revodrives are mainly for graphic designers and movie editors, Fusion-IO drives are for data servers, also, afiak, Fusion-IO drives cannot be booted from

the Octal is around $15k, and if i had the money, i would consider it :P

[DeltrusDisc]

the difference between OCZ Revodrives and Fusion-IO is target market, Revodrives are mainly for graphic designers and movie editors, Fusion-IO drives are for data servers, also, afiak, Fusion-IO drives cannot be booted from

the Octal is around $15k, and if i had the money, i would consider it :P

The whaaat?