nvkhkhr
Prime VIP
In terms of sheer speed, the SSD has already surpassed the more typical hard drives. They can’t compete on storage capacity and price (yet), but they hold the key to instant on machines and much shorter load times. Some SSD are so fast that even the latest SATA-III connections form a bottleneck.
Rather than waiting for a faster SATA port to appear OCZ Technology has decided to bypass the connection completely. The company’s new RevoDrive Hybrid sticks an SSD on a card ready to sit in a free PCI-Express slot. In return, you’ll get 910MB/s data transfers and as much as 120,000 IOPS (4k random writes).
As this is a hybrid drive, the 100GB SSD storage on offer is combined with 1TB of HDD storage, meaning this is likely the only drive you need in your machine. OCZ has optimized performance through the use of clever caching algorithms known as Dataplex. Even so, the superior performance you’ll get from the SSD and SandForce controller may be tempered slightly by the 5,400rpm HDD OCZ chose to use. You can’t argue with 910MB/s read performance though, even if it turns out to be a bit slower during real-world usage.
The one stumbling point, as you’d expect, is the price which sits at $499. Still, for those transfer speeds and the peace of mind offered by a 3-year warranty, some enthusiasts will be tempted.
Before getting your credit card out though, just consider that you can buy a 120GB SSD for less than $200 that still offers great performance. That’s a super fast drive, and $300 in your pocket for a faster CPU or graphics card.
