Conclusion:

As a system memory manufacturer, OCZ Technology could always be counted on to raise the performance bar through innovative new designs. Now that they have decided to concentrate on solid state drives, it can be seen that the same spirit that made their system memory so appealing to enthusiasts is being applied to SSDs.

The RevoDrive 50GB PCI Express SSD is a very interesting product in terms of design and performance. It provides a fairly novel way to add high speed solid state storage to a desktop system, while taking advantage of an expansion slot that may otherwise go unused. To top it all off, the transfer rates achieved by the RevoDrive during testing made other SSDs (that were previously considered to be fast) just look silly.



Another benefit I can see from having an SSD such as the RevoDrive became clear when the issue arose with the Sandybridge SATA 3Gbps controllers. My typical system builds now have three drives... an SSD boot drive, a HDD data drive, and an optical drive. If I were to use all SATA devices, I would wind up with at least one drive on a SATA 3Gbps port, since the Sandybridge boards I have seen (and the two I own) have just two SATA 6Gbps ports. By moving the boot drive SSD to a PCI Express slot, I can now use the two SATA 6Gbps ports for the data drive HDD and optical drive. This move is obviously good for performance now and in the future, and I don't need to worry about RMA'ing these boards in April, or whenever it is that replacements should be available.

On the down side, there isn't much to say. While the drive isn't quite plug and play since you need to have the driver downloaded from the OCZ Technology website, that is just a few extra minutes you have to spend once. The main issue I had was in trying to get some disk utilities to recognize the drive. I couldn't get CrystalDiskInfo to report any information on the drive since it couldn't see it, and I could not use some of my usual drive cloning applications to copy a Windows install on to the RevoDrive for the same reasons.

Shopping around for the 50GB RevoDrive doesn't lead you to too many locations. OCZ Technology does have some newer and higher capacity PCI Express SSDs, so perhaps this one is just being phased out. That said, a few stores do have it in stock starting at just over $200 (US). To my surprise, Walmart is one of the best options, where the price is $227. While this is obviously a high price to pay for a 50GB SSD, this isn't your typical drive. Comparing the price of the 50GB RevoDrive to a pair of traditional, similarly sized SSDs to be used in RAID 0 is a much better way to look at this. Your typical 40GB-50GB SSD is going to cost $100-$120, so buying a pair will obviously add up to about $200-$240. You then need to have a RAID controller to hook these two drives up in RAID 0 manually in order to hope to get the same level of performance. From this point of view, the price is quite competitive.

The bottom line is that the RevoDrive 50GB PCI Express SSD is a very impressive product made possible thanks to OCZ Technology's innovation and drive to offer enthusiasts high performance hardware. It therefore earns the Bigbruin.com "Great Idea" and "Recommended" awards.



Pros:

» Extremely impressive performance
» Excellent solution for avoiding the SATA issue on Sandybridge systems
» Competitively priced when compared to two high performance drives to be used in RAID 0

Cons:

» Price is high if you simply compare it to other 50GB SSDs
» Haven't found any drive cloning software that works with it yet

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