OCZ Vertex 4 review - impressive

[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:






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 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.