Installation & Testing Procedures
Installing the RevoDrive 3 is very easy, just plug it in to any open PCI-E slot on your motherboard and you are good to go.  At first your system will not recognize the drive, you will need to install OCZ’s driver to get things up and running.  The driver is available on OCZ’s website.  Once  you have the driver installed your system will recognize the drive and you are ready to use it.  One thing you might also want to install in the OCZ Toolbox.  The software allows you to easily update the firmware on the drive and has some other features like secure erase.

The RevoDrive does not show up in CrystalDiskInfo so we loaded up HD Tune Pro and hit the info tab.  Here you can see that the drive does support SMART, NCQ and most importantly TRIM.

After we partition the drive and format it we are left with 223GB of usable space.

For testing the drive we will be using the following benchmarking programs, we have provided links to each so you can run the benchmarks as well.

- HDTune Pro (download)
- Sandra Physical Disks Benchmark (download)
- ATTO Disk Benchmark (download)
- CrystalDiskMark 64bit (download)
- AS SSD Benchmark (download)
- Anvil Storage Utility Professional (download)

We also made these optimization changes…
- No power saving options in the BIOS
- ACHI enabled in the BIOS
- Windows 7 User Account Control (UAC) is disabled
- Windows 7 power saving settings are disabled

For comparison we will be testing the RevoDrive 3 drive against these other solid state drives.

Patriot Wildfire 120GB (Review)
Corsair Force GT 120GB (Review)
OCZ Agility 3 240GB (Review)
OCZ Vertex 3 240GB (Review)

Now on to testing!