OCZ RevoDrive 3 X2 240 GB PCIe SSD Reviewed

[Nemo]

If you're interested in some incredible performance from your storage device, you need to check out the OCZ RevoDrive 3 X2 240 GB - http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/ocz_revodrive_3_x2_240gb/

[Black64]

I feel like I am always the first to comment on a review.

[HarryTaco]

If you're interested in some incredible performance from your storage device, you need to check out the OCZ RevoDrive 3 X2 240 GB - http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/ocz_revodrive_3_x2_240gb/

 

This could be the begining of a whole new wave of Storage Drives. Helping to breakdown the High $$ of SSD.

[Black64]

This could be the begining of a whole new wave of Storage Drives. Helping to breakdown the High $$ of SSD.

 

Why? It's like 4 times more expense then a Sata SSD.

[IVIYTH0S]

Why? It's like 4 times more expense then a Sata SSD.

, the peformance of these are always great but they couldn't be used in laptops and need special driver catering to be made a boot drive.

[kevinkga]

Got this drive yesterday and was quick to set it up to work in my new i7-3960X based system.

 

Basically, after a long painstaking driver installation process, here is what I have gathered:

The drive can be picked up by the kernel driver 'mvsas' but this shows the drive as four 60GB drives. In fact, it would seem that OCZ has simply bundled four SSDs onto a board and provided a SCSI/RAID controller chip to RAID 0 these drives, thus the advertised performance specs. lspci shows this device as: "SCSI Storage controller: OCZ Technology Group, Inc. RevoDrive 3 X2 PCI-Express SSD 240GB (Marvell Controller) (rev 02)".

 

So the first issue is that it appears that you can use this device as four separate drives, but even that is not actually entirely true. If you do want to use this as a separate 60GBx4 drive then you'll soon find out that you cannot boot from, let's say the first drive (/dev/sda1), because grub can't even install its bootloader to the device. The only other solution to work around this is to use the proprietary ocz10xx.ko driver for some of the other OCZ PCIe-based devices. You will find that this kernel module has been compiled for a specific handful of distributions(all 64-bit) but that those distributions are already old and outdated.

 

This means that this device will work fine with Ubuntu 10.10, for instance, but will not work with Ubuntu 11.12.

 

The second issue is that, if my theory is correct, you will not be getting the advertised read/write rates even if you do use it as a separate drive.

 

This is such a shame that OCZ have closed source drivers that they've only compiled for old 64-bit only linux distributions. This investigation has been a huge waste of my time and I'm pretty sure I would have been able to get similar/better performance by just RAIDing 4 normal SSDs together.

 

What could have been a four/five star rating is simply let down by poor driver design that renders this drive useless for my gentoo system. Hardware-wise the product has some merit. However, OCZ should learn to favour customer satisfaction and release the driver instead of undermining their product reputation so much. This item will very likely be returned if possible.

[Waco]

If you had asked they probably would have told you that. It's the same deal with any of the Fusion-IO products as well. The driver blob doesn't keep up with the newest kernels at all and they won't give you the source, no matter what.

[Praz]

Sorry that you are disappointed with your purchase of the RevoDrive 3. The specifications and marketing material lists Win7 as the only operating system supported for the drive. The enterprise family of drives based on the same technology support a wide range of operating systems and versions. OCZ works one on one with their enterprise customers to ensure the product works in the intended environment for which the drives are purchased. This includes drivers for operating systems over and above those listed at OCZ.com for public download.