RevoDrive 3 Overview
The RevoDrive 3 does not look like your ordinary solid state drive, this is because it is a PCI-E card! Like previous versions OCZ uses a black PCB, but it is unlikely that many people will see this card inside of your case anyways. Like all of the previous versions the RevoDrive 3 has a set of SSD’s on a PCI-E card, which are in a RAID configuration and the delivery is over the PCI-E bus.
OCZ uses their own RAID solution, which they call the OCZ SuperScale storage accelerator, which reduces host CPU cycles and thus load on your system. This RAID solution uses a virtualized software layer that gives the drive options that were unavailable to previous versions of the RevoDrive. OCZ calls this software VCA 2.0. The most note-worthy option added to the RevoDrive 3 is TRIM but VCA 2.0 also adds SMART monitoring, NCQ, TCQ, and complete power failure protection. Each of the 2 drives on the PCB are controlled by SandForce SF-2281 solid state drive controllers. These controllers are rated for sequential read and write speeds of 500MB/s. Some of the fastest drives we have tested with these controllers max out at about 550MB/s. With OCZ’s RAID configuration on the RevoDrive 3 it is rated for read and write speeds of 900MB/s and 1000MB/s respectively and up to 130,000 IOPS (4K write aligned).
Looking at the NAND chips interesting enough they are labeled OCZ. The NAND chips are IMFT Async 25nm MLC NAND chips. They are labeled OCZ because they are now in the position where they can purchase whole wafers direct and package them into NAND die themselves. This enables them to manage their product availability better. There are a total of 32 8GB chips on the RevoDrive 3, so you have 256GB total, 240GB of which is used.
As I said the storage is set in to 2 different drives or partitions, each of which is 128GB and controlled by its own SandForce controller. The drives are configured in a RAID 0 setup.
