OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid Solid State Drive Review

RevoDrive Hybrid Overview
The RevoDrive Hybrid looks like many of the previous RevoDrive’s that we have looked at except there is a large SATA drive sitting on top of it.  The drive itself is actually a PCI-Express card.  There are actually two PCB’s on it, with the top holding our 1TB drive.  Upon further inspection the drive is Toshiba drive.  It is attached to the PCB by a simple SATA connection at the back.

OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid Solid State Drive OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid Solid State Drive

To get a better look at things I decided to remove the top PCB.  I do not believe that this will void your warranty, but I would not suggest it.  To take the top PCB off you just remove 4 screws and unplug it from the bottom PCB.  Once removed this really looks like a normal RevoDrive.

OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid Solid State Drive OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid Solid State Drive

The RevoDrive Hybrid is built on the RevoDrive 3 architecture.  So you have two SandForce SF-2281chips connected to a RAID controller set to run in RAID 0 mode and the data transfer is made via a PCI-Express bridge chip.  We see a total of 16 (4 on the front 12 on the back) Intel 25nm flash chips.  So if you do your math correctly each NAND chip is 8GB giving us a total of 128GB.

OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid Solid State Drive OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid Solid State Drive OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid Solid State Drive

You will notice a small heatsink on the drive.  This is covering OCZ’s RAID controller, they call it 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 layer VCA 2.0.  Here is what OCZ says about VCA 2.0

“VCA 2.0 flash virtualization software allows certain direct memory access (DMA) and data management functions. Included in this feature-set are OCZ’s exclusive command queuing and queue balancing algorithms, which can be handled by the onboard processing core for higher performance and reduced burden on the host resources. VCA 2.0 is also the only virtualization layer in the industry with TRIM and SCSI unmap support to enhance sustained performance and provide greater endurance by significantly reducing the overhead associated with garbage collection. Furthermore, VCA also offers consolidated SMART support and provides system administrators with advanced features for monitoring, analyzing, and reporting device attributes.”

The I/O shield on the RevoDrive Hybrid has holes in it to help with cooling and airflow.

OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid Solid State Drive OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid Solid State Drive

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