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has been compiled for a specific handful of distributions(all 64-bit) but that those distributions are already old and outdated.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.