OCZ RevoDrive 400 NVMe SSD Unveiled With Nearly 2.7GB/Sec Tested Throughput (hothardware.com)

MojoKid writes: Solid State Drive technology continues to make strides in performance, reliability and cost. At the CES 2016 show there were a number of storage manufacturers on hand showing off their latest grear, though not many made quite the splash that Toshiba's OCZ Technology group made with the annoucement of their new RevoDrive 400 NVMe PCI Express SSD. OCZ is tapping on Toshiba's NVMe controller technology to deliver serious bandwidth in this consumer-targeted M.2 gumstick style drive that also comes with a X4 PCI Express card adapater. The drive boasts specs conservatively at 2.4GB/sec for reads and 1.6GB/sec for writes in peak sequential transfer bandwidth. IOPs are rated at 210K and 140K for writes respectively. In the demo ATTO test they were running, the RevoDrive 400 actually peaks at 2.69GB/sec for reads and also hits every bit of that 1.6GB/sec write spec for large sequential transfers.

Comments

Re:Size

[Anonymous Coward]

It's primarily M.2. (look it up), M.2 is only on very new mobos, so to actually sell the things they sell it will a PCI-E adaptor.

No supercapacitors?

[butlerm]

I think it is more than a little amusing that anyone cares about performance numbers on a drive like this without first asking whether the drive provides any assurance that it won't catastrophically lose all your data, if not be bricked permanently, due to a simple power loss. That seems to be par for the course with the most of the SSDs on the market. Preserving your data? That is an enterprise feature.

Re:No supercapacitors?

[TeknoHog]

regular spinning drives don't provide any assurance against catastrophic data loss, either. you should always have backups.

When the power suddenly goes out, regular spinning drives don't generally lose everything that's already on platters. With SSDs, their internal state is more in flux, as older blocks can still be reorganized all the time. Also, there's much more logic between the actual storage and the outside interface, so a bad controller can easily make everything inaccessible, even if the data is still there in the storage medium.

Not a fan

[jargonburn]

I'm pretty sure every drive (small sample size) I've used from OCZ has failed within two years. And half the RAM.

I don't use them, anymore; I got tired of them using me.

Actual benefit in regular use vs. SATA3 SSD?

[swb]

While I'm sure there's a whole world of forum posters with their disk benchmarks in their warlording signature who go for this kind of thing because they want to be the guy with the best benchmark numbers, what's the actual performance gain in a typical kind of scenario vs. a SATA3 SSD?

These kinds of sequential benchmarks don't really tell me how much real-world time something like this will shave off booting a computer, launching an application, etc versus a more conventional solution.

Re:Actual benefit in regular use vs. SATA3 SSD?

[Kjella]

These kinds of sequential benchmarks don't really tell me how much real-world time something like this will shave off booting a computer, launching an application, etc versus a more conventional solution.

About as much faster as you'd get to work in a race car. If you're not doing anything storage intense, the PCIe bandwidth is not going to make much of a difference. Same with NVMe, main advantage is at big queue depths. This technology isn't coming because consumers are demanding it, but because of enterprise needs. Now they're looking for prosumers who are willing to pay more, but not quite enterprise money for performance. I'm guessing eventually it'll trickle down to consumers since PCIe and NVMe are far more natural interfaces for SSDs than SATA but it won't make much of a real world difference. A bit like DDR4, it doesn't really offer much over DDR3 for consumers but because the enterprise needs it, it's trickled down to Skylake.

Re:Actual benefit in regular use vs. SATA3 SSD?

[Solandri]

Unless you're doing something storage-intensive with very large files (e.g. real-time video editing), there's very little benefit. The problem is we perceive computer speed in terms of how much time we have to wait, and MB/s is the inverse of wait time (sec/MB). So each doubling of MB/s only results in half the decrease in wait time of the previous doubling. Imagine you needed to read 1 GB of sequential data.

125 MB/s HDD = 8 sec
250 MB/s SATA 2 SSD = 4 sec
500 MB/s SATA 3 SSD = 2 sec
1 GB/s PCIe SSD = 1 sec
2 GB/s NVMe SSD = 0.5 sec
4 GB/sec SSD = 0.25 sec

See how the decrease in wait time is halved with each step? And how even an infinitely fast SSD can never save you as much time as the jump from a HDD to a SATA2 SSD? We've already achieved most of the time savings there is to get from SSDs. The rest is mostly dick-waving to come up with a bigger MB/s number which means very little in actual use.

(Same thing goes for MPG - it's the inverse of fuel consumption. So the higher the MPG, the fuel each additional 10 MPG saves. The rest of the world measures fuel efficiency in liters/100 km for this reason. Each person you convince to switch from a 15 MPG SUV to a 25 MPG sedan saves 1.33x more fuel than each person in a 25 MPG sedan you convince to buy a 50 MPG Prius. And improving a tractor trailer's efficiency from 6 MPG to 7 MPG saves more fuel per mile than switching from a sedan to a Prius, despite the "improvement" being 1 MPG vs 25 MPG.)

On top of this, the predominant cause of delays when accessing a SSD are the small file (4k) read/writes. And this drive less than doubles those (140-210K IOPS, vs about 100-130K IOPS with current SATA3 SSDs).

OCZ = Toshiba

[Gravis Zero]

So I thought I recalled that OCZ went bust and i was right because this isn't the same OCZ, it's OCZ Storage Solutions not OCZ Technology Group. Basically, Toshiba bought up the remnants of the company and took the name and logo and founded OCZ Storage Solutions on January 21, 2014. So of course they are using Toshiba's this and that because they are Toshiba.

Re:OCZ = Toshiba

[TeknoHog]

Why on Earth would they use the infamous OCZ name when Toshiba was a perfectly good hard drive brand (at least until the Hitachi deal)?

Re:What's wrong with comments in the subject

[drinkypoo]

So stop buying cheap, shitty power supplies. I've never had a power supply failure.

While I've had more failures from cheap, shitty power supplies than from name brand ones, I've also had name brand ones fail.