14 DAY TRIAL // OCZ has been feeling pretty adventurous lately when it comes to designing SSDs, but few of their products have been more ambitious than the Revo Drive Hybrid unit that the company has on display at Computex this year.
As probably you must have guessed by now, OCZ's new PCI Express solid state drive is based on a hybrid design which combines a standard HDD with an SSD.
This way, users will be able to benefit from the large storage capacities offered by today's platter-based drives, as well as from the high speeds provided by SSDs, as the latter will be used as a fast memory cache for the HDD.
Speaking of the HDD, this is a pretty standard 2.5-inch unit and can offer either 500GB or 1TB of extra capacity to its users.
The SSD part of the device is powered by the new Revo Drive 3, which has been left pretty much unaltered outside of the HDD daughterboard that was installed on it.
This means that the RevoDrive Hybrid uses four SandForce SF-2200 controllers setup to run in a RAID 0 mode that are connected to a PCI Express bridge chip.
The card goes into an empty PCI-E x4 slot and can range in capacity between 240GB and 960GB, but OCZ hasn't stated how much of the space available will be allocated to the caching function.
As far as performance is concerned, the San Jose-based company said that the drive is able to achieve read and transfer rates of 575MB/z and 500MB/s, respectively, while random 4K read performance is estimated at 30,000 IOPS.
OCZ is expected to release the Revo Drive Hybrid in July, but this could have a limited shelf life as starting from Q2 2012, all Intel motherboards will support SSD caching. The recommended retail price is set at $699 for the 240GB model. (via AnandTech)