What happens when you take the screamingly fast, PCI-E based OCZ RevoDrive and physically pair it with a 1TB hard drive? You get the best of both storage worlds with both high speed and high capacity. But can the RevoDrive Hybrid compare favorably to a tradition SSD/HDD setup or even the Intel SRT technology in terms of performance and value? We do the grunt work to find out!
So, does the RevoDrive Hybrid really provide that speedy SSD feel with gobs of storage for a reasonable cost? The answer is yes - for the most part. Bear in mind that the whole premise behind the drive is to cache the 'hot' (most frequently/last used) data onto the SSD to hasten the read/writes. This it does very effectively once the data is identified by the algorithm and cached. Overall, this worked very well and we saw considerable improvements in boot times and data access in our real world tests...
As someone on the fence myself I'm torn to find the "right" storage solution for me. I currently have two WD Black drives in RAID0 for a total of 1.1tb. I've been considering going to SRT on my next build as I don't want he hassle of installing apps across multiple volumes. My other thought was to swap out to two Momentus drives in RAID0. That would be less than half the cost of this drive. I wonder how it would perform though.
***EDIT***
After a bit of research I've found the Momentus Drives will NOT use the SSD cache whilst in RAID0.
Last edited by Skippman on Wed Oct 19, 2011 3:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.
It's a Microsoft issue. I wouldn't worry about the TRIM piece...there a lot of overprovisioning on the SSD and the SandForce drives really do well without TRIM.
yeah, TRIM doesn't work with Intel Smart Response Technology on the SSD either... I just asked them that this week for another reader and got this answer:
When caching is enabled Intel® Smart Response Technology does not pass the TRIM command straight through to the section of the SSD used as a cache. The TRIM information is used however as part of the caching algorithms. Additionally, when the cache is enabled or disabled the TRIM command is sent down to the entire range of LBA’s used for the Cache region of the SSD. For the portion of the SSD that optionally may not be used as a cache, TRIM commands are passed through.
