OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid Solid State Drive Review

Final Thoughts
When it comes to pure performance once your data is cached the RevoDrive Hybrid is one of the fastest drives that we have tested to date!  The only drive that even came close was OCZ’s own RevoDrive 3.  With speeds of just under 1GB/s read and just over 800MB/s write in ATTO Disk Benchmark we were very impressed.  These speeds are much faster than Seagate’s Momentus XT hybrid drive, Intel’s Smart Response Technology and even OCZ’s own Synapse Cache drive.  This is because the RevoDrive Hybrid uses a PCI-Express interface rather than a SATA interface like most hard drives.

One thing that will take you some time is installing Windows on your RevoDrive Hybrid.  This drive is meant to be your primary drive you so need to first download the drivers to a flash drive to install with the Windows installation, then you have to install Windows, which with the 5400RPM Toshiba drive can be pretty slow.  After all that is done you need to download the Dataplex software, install it reboot and you are finally ready to go.  Also one thing to note is that the Dataplex software is only compatible with Windows 7.  Also you can not switch out the 5400RPM drive for a faster one.

OCZ has always been on the cutting-edge when it comes to solid state drive technology and we have seen this since the release of the first RevoDrive.  It does do a great job of providing the super fast speed of a solid state drive, yet has the capacity of a normal hard drive.  I think that it all comes down to user experience.  Keep in mind we saw our best performance results when we ran many of the tests multiple times.  This is because the drive had to cache the data first.  So if you are running the same programs over and over again you are going notice them loading faster and faster, which makes for a great experience. We saw the same thing with the Windows boot time, we went from 50 seconds all the way down to 22 seconds.  Also the cache drive does not reset after you restart your system, which is a good thing.

This drive is pretty reasonable when it comes to price, you can pick it up at my favorite online retailer for $329.99.  This is about the same price as most high performance 240GB solid state drives.  Overall ThinkComputers gives the OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid Solid State Drive a 9 out of 10 score and our Recommended Award!

rating9 10 small TC award recommended small

Pros:
– One of the fastest drives we have tested
– Reasonable price for performance / capacity
– 3 year warranty
– Bootable

Cons:
– Can only be used with Windows 7
– Data must first be cached before you see the true performance

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