OCZ RevoDrive 3 120GB PCIe Solid State Drive

Model: OCZ RevoDrive 3 120GB PCIe Solid State Drive
Manufacturer: OCZ Technology
Provided By: OCZ Technology

OCZ Technology is no stranger to the computer industry. Founded by enthusiasts, for enthusiasts, the company entered the memory market in 2002. Determined to manufacture the very best memory for overclockers, OCZ quickly established itself as a leader in the industry by breaking speed barriers and maintaining a reputation of quality. Today, OCZ continues to innovate. Along with their line of enthusiast-oriented power supplies, the company offers a wide range of high-performance SSD solutions for the enterprise and consumer markets.

With solid-state technology advancing at a faster rate than traditional interfaces, OCZ has begun to look for ways to eliminate the SATA bottleneck. Last summer the company launched its RevoDrive 3 series of PCIe-based SSDs. Designed with power users and multimedia designers in mind, this bootable, workstation-class SSD employs a PCIe 2.0 4x interface as well as two SandForce SF-2281 controllers in RAID 0 to deliver up to 1000MB/s read and 925MB/s write speeds as well as a maximum of 130,000 4KB random write IOPS.

Along with exceptional performance, the RevoDrive 3 features OCZ’s proprietary Virtualized Controller Architecture (VCA) 2.0. Included in this feature-set are OCZ’s exclusive command queuing and queue balancing algorithms, which are handled by the onboard processing core for higher performance and reduced burden on the host CPU. VCA 2.0 also offers SMART data monitoring and is the only virtualization layer in the industry with TRIM and SCSI unmap support to enhance sustained performance and provide greater endurance by reducing the overhead associated with garbage collection.

For this review, OCZ sent us the 120GB version of the RevoDrive 3. This SSD is capable of delivering up to 975 MB/s sequential read and 875 MB/s sequential write speeds as well as up to 120,000 random write IOPS.