OCZ Vertex 4 review - impressive

[Bollwerk]

If you're looking to buy an SSD, give this one a serious look - http://www.anandtech.com/show/5719/ocz-vertex-4-review-256gb-512gb/1

[MiRai]

Seems that they're confident using the new Indilinx Everest controller with that 5 year warranty. The Vertex 4 might just be what OCZ needed to get them back in the game.

[Peli]

I always love to see technology pushing forward alongside a bit of a price war. :D

[Selz]

Performance
Max Sequential Read: Up to 1500 MB/s
Max Sequential Write: Up to 1225 MB/s
4KB Random Write: Up to 200,000 IOPS

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227744

Please burn the money on something your going to "love" and something that does not brake down / have weird issues.

[MiRai]

Please burn the money on something your going to "love" and something that does not brake down / have weird issues.
People can barely handle $1/GB while buying an SSD drive and even then you have to find a good deal to get that. You're asking them to spend almost $3/GB (~$2.70/GB) on technology that is far less proven than an actual SSD is. How can you possibly make the claim that it isn't going to break down or have any weird issues? Are you personally giving the green light on this product? I'm not sure you were paying attention when OCZ had endless firmware issues with SandForce based drives?

I'm not a fan of Newegg reviews, but over 20% of the reviews are 2 "eggs" or less. If you head over to OCZ's PCIe forum (http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?255-OCZ-Revo-OCZ-Revo-x2-OCZ-Revo3-OCZ-Ibis-HSDL-support-and-discussion) you'll see there are a lot of people that are having "weird issues" with these cards. Also, here's a review from our good friend Anandtech (http://www.anandtech.com/show/4470/ocz-revodrive-3-x2-480gb-preview).


For the majority of users the RevoDrive 3 X2 is simply overkill. I even demonstrated in some of our IO bound tests that you're bottlenecked by the workload before you're limited by the hardware. That being said, if you have the right workload - I've already shown that you can push nearly 1.5GB/s of data through the card and hit random IOPS numbers of over 180K (~756MB/s in our QD32 test). Even if you have the workload however I still have two major concerns: TRIM support and reliability.
I would hardly call multiboxing World of Warcraft "the right workload," but then again, I could be wrong because I have nothing to back that statement up. However, Anand talks about a server environment which is why I don't think World of Warcraft is the right workload for this PCIe card. Anand's article also shows that the super awesome (and super expensive) Revo 3 X2 drive doesn't really do any better than a normal SSD when it comes to certain benchmarks. So while you may gain some speed in certain aspects of the game, you're just as limited as the rest of the people with regular non-raid SSDs.

On my SSD, it takes me 5 - 6 seconds for all of my games to load into the world and that is with a plethora of add-ons x5. Does the Revo 3 X2 shave another 1 - 2 seconds off of that? Sounds like #firstworldproblems (https://twitter.com/#!/search/%23firstworldproblems) to me.

So, when you say "burn your money" you're absolutely right. I'm not telling people to not buy this drive/card if they have money to burn. What I am saying is that recommending this drive/card over a regular SSD is wrong.

[Selz]

My friend has the Revodrive and I have been jealus of that since day one. Surely it is more expensive and my messege should really only go to the people who can spend that kind of money. As of raid I believe your talking about a Raid0. Surely if you combine multiple SSD and have spend a bunch of money on a good raidcontroler then it might just be faster, but that really isnt a cheap solution either, also if your going to achivede 1500/1225 MB/s you would have to combine a lot of regular SSD's since the scaling is not 100% and the more you combine the bigger the loss. I remember the Samsung SSD Awesomeness video with 24 SSD's and a proper raidcontroler now thise were old generation SSD's and didnt have close to 500/500MB/s as of the current once. They only scaled to 2gb/s which to me seems like a really bad scaling. So the amount of speed/IOPS you get from the revodrive is redicules and very well spend money. I do agree it is expensive. But I can guarentee it's woth it. Unless the amount of space is what you want.

Ofcause I can't make the claim that it "wont" brake down or have issues. Noone really can.
But around the interwebz I have seen endless posts of people hating their SSD's because of issues
it could ofcause be argueed that the RevoDrive have not sold as many products yet, so therefor the amount of issues that have been reported is far less.

What really happend: I was looking at the newegg and saw the Revodrive at 655$. Now for me that price is a total ripoff
in Denmark this version cost 30-40% more. So at first it didnt even sound too expensive to me, but ofcause Denmark just is an expensive contry for those kind of products, So I guess it was just the price difference that fucked me up, id even buy a used one for that money :)

[Peli]

Performance
Max Sequential Read: Up to 1500 MB/s
Max Sequential Write: Up to 1225 MB/s
4KB Random Write: Up to 200,000 IOPS

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227744

Please burn the money on something your going to "love" and something that does not brake down / have weird issues.

I'm hesitant to spend more on a storage device than I did on my Processor, motherboard, RAM and Video Card combined.

[MiRai]

My friend has the Revodrive and I have been jealus of that since day one.
It's unhealthy to be jealous of people who have lots of money or make bad decisions with their money.


As of raid I believe your talking about a Raid0. Surely if you combine multiple SSD and have spend a bunch of money on a good raidcontroler then it might just be faster, but that really isnt a cheap solution either
I was saying that non-raid SSDs are just as fast as the Revo 3 X2 (which happens to use RAID0) in certain benchmarks. Specifically these:

http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph4470/39226.png

http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph4470/39228.png


Random reads and random writes are what make the operating system (and games for the most part) feel "snappy" and more responsive. As you can see, the $1700 PCIe card doesn't offer any more than a regular SSD will offer during normal operating conditions. If you look at the other graphs in that review it shows that when the queue depth goes up, the PCIe card takes the lead.

From what I understand, the queue depth is how many tasks are "queued" on the drive itself. However, if everything is loaded into RAM then the disk is seeing no action.

I realize that we're multiboxers and that doesn't exactly fall under "normal operating conditions"; but, as I said in my last post, I can't imagine that multiboxing World of Warcraft (unless on a grand scale) would put the same load on a drive compared to a server workload environment.


also if your going to achivede 1500/1225 MB/s you would have to combine a lot of regular SSD's since the scaling is not 100% and the more you combine the bigger the loss. I remember the Samsung SSD Awesomeness video with 24 SSD's and a proper raidcontroler now thise were old generation SSD's and didnt have close to 500/500MB/s as of the current once. They only scaled to 2gb/s which to me seems like a really bad scaling. So the amount of speed/IOPS you get from the revodrive is redicules and very well spend money. I do agree it is expensive. But I can guarentee it's woth it. Unless the amount of space is what you want.
How could you possibly guarantee that when you don't even own one? Can you guarantee that 5-boxing (or even 10-boxing) will utilize 1.5GB/sec of speed? World of Warcraft benefits from random reads and random writes and, as I've shown above, you're very limited.

Here's a Tom's Hardware article (http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-gaming-performance,2991-8.html) breaking down how World of Warcraft uses SSDs (this has been linked on this forum before).

Launching World of Warcraft:

87% of all operations occur at a queue depth of one
55% of all operations are random
27% of operations are 16 KB, 20% are 4 KB, 15% are 32 KB, 7% are 128 KB

Launching your games isn't going to happen any faster with a RevoDrive than it will with a regular SSD. You may notice a slight increase of speed but, it would be negligible.

Realm Loading:

88% of all operations occur at a queue depth of one
62% of all operations are random

Loading into a realm is not going to happen much faster, either. I stated in my previous post that it takes me 5 - 6 seconds to load into a realm on 5 game clients with a lot of addons. With a $650 RevoDrive I can load my game clients in about 3 - 5 seconds now.

Gameplay:

82% of all operations are sequential
70% of all operations occur at a queue depth of one
38% 4 KB, 28% 128 KB, 9% 16 KB, 8% 8 KB

Again, we're looking at a majority of operations occurring at a queue depth of one. During actual gameplay we're finally seeing more sequential reads but still, where are you going to benefit from this? A major city? I don't know about you, but a high populated major city brings my GPUs up to a very high load which is where I see the decrease in FPS. A $650 RevoDrive is not going to increase my FPS if my GPU and CPU can't handle the load.

Just because a drive is capable of 1.5GB/sec doesn't mean that it is constantly operating at that speed. As a real world example, compare the RevoDrive to an automobile and compare normal operating conditions in a PC to the roads that people drive on every day. Speedometers go well over 100 MPH (160 KPH) and how often are people allowed to drive that fast legally? Never. During normal operating conditions all of that speed is wasted and never used. A server environment would be more like a racetrack where all of that speed is necessary.


Ofcause I can't make the claim that it "wont" brake down or have issues. Noone really can.
But around the interwebz I have seen endless posts of people hating their SSD's because of issues
That's the thing, the RevoDrive you linked is just 4 SSDs in RAID0 on one single card -- It's not some special device from outer space that no one has ever seen before. It's still an SSD, it just uses a PCIe interface as opposed to a SATA II/III.

To reiterate, I'm not saying don't buy this drive if you don't have money to throw away. I would love to try one of these out but, I can think of plenty of other things to spend $650 on rather than a PCIe SSD where OCZ and SandForce don't exactly have the best track record for reliability (and the drive only comes with a 3 year warranty for that price).

What I am saying is that telling people that they're wasting their money on regular SATA SSDs and that they should be looking at purchasing PCIe SSDs for double the price, possibly less reliability, and a lesser warranty is a very ignorant thing to do.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Here's a Tom's Hardware article (http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-gaming-performance,2991-8.html) breaking down how World of Warcraft uses SSDs (this has been linked on this forum before).

Launching World of Warcraft:

87% of all operations occur at a queue depth of one
55% of all operations are random
27% of operations are 16 KB, 20% are 4 KB, 15% are 32 KB, 7% are 128 KB


Launching your games isn't going to happen any faster with a RevoDrive than it will with a regular SSD. You may notice a slight increase of speed but, it would be negligible.

Realm Loading:

88% of all operations occur at a queue depth of one
62% of all operations are random


Loading into a realm is not going to happen much faster, either. I stated in my previous post that it takes me 5 - 6 seconds to load into a realm on 5 game clients with a lot of addons. With a $650 RevoDrive I can load my game clients in about 3 - 5 seconds now.

Gameplay:

82% of all operations are sequential
70% of all operations occur at a queue depth of one
38% 4 KB, 28% 128 KB, 9% 16 KB, 8% 8 KB



Fascinating! Thanks for the link/info.