OCZ Technology RevoDrive 3 X2 - 480GB SSD Review

For some time the storage market stagnated as the majority of drives released were running at 7200rpm, topping out in terms of speed at a little over 100MB/s. Various manufacturers applied their own tweaks to enhance the user experience such as increasing cache or in the case of Western Digital we got the Raptor range of drives with higher RPM and MB/s. Really though if we wanted significant extra performance it was a case of requiring RAID to get us there with manufacturers more concerned about capacity than speed.

The development and release of SSDs changed that though as numerous manufacturers pushed the technology, creating ever improving designs which within just a few iterations were pushing the boundaries of SATA2 performance. At that point it seemed that SATA3 would be the obvious way forward however for enthusiast users OCZ decided to go another route and released the RevoDrive, a PCIe based device which significantly outperformed SATA based drives, in fact it is still competitive today. Shortly after this the RevoDrive X2 was released, taking performance even higher and offering an interesting alternative for those who feel limited by SATA3 based SSDs.

It had been some time since OCZ released the RevoDrive X2, instead concentrating on various SATA based drives based on the latest Sandforce controller but last month a press release was sent out stating that the RevoDrive 3 and RevoDrive 3 X2 were ready for release. Today we have the higher specification model, the X2 attached to our test system and will be putting it through a selection of real world and synthetic tests to find out if OCZ can meet their claims of 1500MB/s speed and 230k IOPS.