OCZ Revo Makes PCI-Express SSDs Affordable

Various expansion card-based SSDs have been around for years now and they're unequivocally the best of the best of the best, sir. With honours, sir! However, they're also the most expensive, by a country mile - we're talking thousands or tens of thousands of pounds. So, to bring near that level of performance to a more consumer level, OCZ has created the Revo.

This PCI-Express x4 card uses two barefoot controllers each controlling half the memory chips and configured in RAID-0. OCZ says the result is the Revo will have 540 MB/s read and 530 MB/s write speeds with a 75k IOPS rating on 4k random writes. SATA drives, in comparison, are limited to around 250MB/s read/write and 50k IOPS. Certainly, the step up in performance won't be noticed by many - most of us are still ecstatic with the change from a hard drive to a half decent SSD, let alone an uber fast one - but for serious users it could well come in useful.

The drives will be avilable in sizes from 128GB to 480GB and OCZ expects them to be only around 12 - 15 percent more expensive than the SATA equivalents (in terms of capacity). This equates to a around £340 for the 128GB and £1,200 for the 480GB one. Not cheap but certainly within the realms of affordability. You can pick one up come the end of the month.