Desktop solution that makes more sense than pure SSD

S

SouthBit

Dealer
Joined
Jan 6, 2011
Messages
1,173
Reaction score
23
Location
Cape Town
Seagate have their Momentus XT hybrid 2.5" for laptops, and now OCZ has finally come up with a solution for desktops that makes the best use of SSD and HDD technology - PCIe card with 100GB of flash mated to a 2.5" 1TB 2.5"drive.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/05/ocz_revodrive_hybrid/

OCZ plays its joker in the hybrid drive card game

OCZ has put its hybrid drive cards on the table in the shape of the RevoDrive Hybrid, with 1TB of spinning disk and 100GB of flash, gambling that punters will go for that combination of flash speed and disk capacity at a 45¢/GB price.

A prototype was shown in July and its specifications have been uprated. That had 60GB of multi-level cell flash and a 500GB, 2.5-inch disk drive mounted on a PCIe-connected card. It delivered 30,000 random write IOPS 575MB/sec sequential read and 500MB/sec sequential write bandwidth. The pricing was said to be in the 40¢/GB area.
OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid

The flash used four SandForce SF-2200 controllers in a RAID 0 configuration, and OCZ integrated DataPlex caching software to put hot data on the flash and less active data on the disk. OCZ's Virtualised Controller Architecture (VCA) v2.0 software managed the whole device.

The delivered device still uses the DataPlex caching software and VCA. It delivers, OCZ says, up to 120,000 random write IOPS, and up to 910MB/sec, both big improvements. Best assume these are fresh-out-of-the-box numbers.

OCZ CEO Ryan Petersen fingered the general application areas OCZ has in mind: "The RevoDrive Hybrid [is] the ideal solution for high performance computing and media content creation," he said – meaning workstations and, maybe, enthusiasts.

Is it though? A pure flash solution would provide guaranteed speed at a higher price. A pure disk solution gets you more capacity for the same money but won't perform as quickly. Has OCZ hit the sweet spot between these two extremes and, just as importantly, is there a market sweet spot and how big is it?

The RevoDrive Hybrid has a suggested list price of $499.99, which is not outrageous, and people despairing of ever kissing the Windows hourglass or Mac spinning disk goodbye, may well feel 500 bucks is worth paying to kick disk I/O waits out of the ballpark.
 
I would prefer to manually keep things on a pure ssd and data on a normal drive.

I have an inherit mistrust of any software that is going to be deciding what should belong where... maybe I'm wrong and it will work wonderfully...

But for e.g. knowing that everything is on a SSD (C drive) if I experience any problems it becomes easy to track it down, adding an extra layer of complexity makes troubleshooting harder...

just my 2c...
 
As long as you backup your important data, as we all should be doing anyway, I don't see it as a problem. I didn't read into it fully but I would imagine the SSD functions more like a cache of commonly used files, like in the Momentus XT.
 
$500? No thank you. That's about R3 500 (or more like R5k by the time all the local sharks have added their cut, because, you know, importing, taxes, usual excuses)

Think about it. For that money , even if it's only R3500, you could get a 120GB OCZ Vertex3 and a 2TB mechanical drive. So, same performance, much higher capacity, and the ability to choose which data is on the SSD, as well as the added benefits of having 2 physically separate drives which can be independently upgraded/replaced. No offence, but how is this thing any better?
 
Because the 120GB OCZ wouldn't be able to cache what was on the 2TB mechanical drive. It's not purely just 100GB of flash next to a 1TB drive, they work together with the help of the controller.
 
Well yes, but 120GB is more than enough for your OS partition, and you can then put games/data on the 2TB. The stuff on the 2TB drive would probably not qualify as regularly used files through the controller anyway, so it would have loaded from the 1TB mechanical section of this.

Also, how is this different from the Momentus XT you mentioned? Seems to be just the interface (PCIe vs SATA) . Both use a 2.5" drive which is significantly slower than a 3.5" one.
 
TJ99 said:
$500? No thank you. That's about R3 500 (or more like R5k by the time all the local sharks have added their cut, because, you know, importing, taxes, usual excuses)

Think about it. For that money , even if it's only R3500, you could get a 120GB OCZ Vertex3 and a 2TB mechanical drive. So, same performance, much higher capacity, and the ability to choose which data is on the SSD, as well as the added benefits of having 2 physically separate drives which can be independently upgraded/replaced. No offence, but how is this thing any better?
Click to expand...

It's far from the same thing dude, look at those R/W speeds, do you think a ssd can transfer to a 7200 at those rates?

Looks a damn great idea, what is the latency?
 
TJ99 said:
Both use a 2.5" drive which is significantly slower than a 3.5" one.
Click to expand...

Well no that's not really accurate. Take for example a Seagate 7200.12 500GB 3.5" desktop drive versus a Seagate 7200.4 500GB 2.5" laptop drive:

Laptop
Average latency: 4.17 msec
Average seek time (read): 11.0 msec

Dekstop
Average latency: 4.16 msec
Average seek time (read): 8.5 msec

Really not much of a difference at all.
 
So everything will be slow again?

SSD's power comes from the seek time which is generally 0.1 compared to 8 and 11, i know we talking ms but the only thing you get is high R/W everything will still take long to open and so on.

For me unless the seek time is not as low as the ssd then for most people 900mb r/w means nothing. I could be wrong though.
 
South_Bit said:
Well no that's not really accurate. Take for example a Seagate 7200.12 500GB 3.5" desktop drive versus a Seagate 7200.4 500GB 2.5" laptop drive:

Laptop
Average latency: 4.17 msec
Average seek time (read): 11.0 msec

Dekstop
Average latency: 4.16 msec
Average seek time (read): 8.5 msec

Really not much of a difference at all.
Click to expand...

More than 20% seems like a difference to me. Still, how is this better then the much cheaper Momentus hybrid?
 
South_Bit said:
Because the 120GB OCZ wouldn't be able to cache what was on the 2TB mechanical drive. It's not purely just 100GB of flash next to a 1TB drive, they work together with the help of the controller.
Click to expand...

The SSD Caching is software based, not hardware based. It is just attempting to tie you in to paying a premium because caching software is either hardware restricted (e.g. RST) or is only available through OEMs or these kind of setups by SSD manufacturers (e.g. DataPlex and ExpressCache).

Were anyone actually selling the software to the end user or bundled with SSDs, then this would look far less attractive than it does due to the largely artificial restrictions on the distribution of caching software.
 
TJ99 said:
More than 20% seems like a difference to me. Still, how is this better then the much cheaper Momentus hybrid?
Click to expand...
With this you can use any size SSD, where as the Momentus XT hybrid is limited to a 4GB SSD, which isn't much really.
This also allow you much more bandwidth (max sequential read/write speeds) than what SATA III can offer.

Do you guys also have issues loading http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/05/ocz_revodrive_hybrid/ ?
I'm having issues loading that page both on my Mweb uncapped & NeoBroadband connections - both DNS issues.
 
Rudimental said:
The SSD Caching is software based, not hardware based. It is just attempting to tie you in to paying a premium because caching software is either hardware restricted (e.g. RST) or is only available through OEMs or these kind of setups by SSD manufacturers (e.g. DataPlex and ExpressCache).

Were anyone actually selling the software to the end user or bundled with SSDs, then this would look far less attractive than it does due to the largely artificial restrictions on the distribution of caching software.
Click to expand...

This makes much more sense..

@Pada. Nope, mine's working fine. Also on Mweb uncapped. Although I'm using Google DNS.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X