If you are clued up on computer storage solutions you will probably be aware that hard disk drives are great in terms of their storage to price ratio, however solid-state drives offer much faster performance and prices are getting more competitive year on year. The general feeling is that SSDs will replace HDDs in the future, but for now large capacity SSDs are too expensive for most consumers – this is where the OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid comes in.
So what is the OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid? Well it merges the advantages of HDDs and SSDs together to create an affordable solution for those of you who want fast performance and lots of storage, It slots into your computer’s PCI Express slot and gives you 100GB of storage via SSD and a further 1TB of storage via a HDD. Below you can see what the product looks like (we think that it uses the PCI Express x4 slot).
In terms of performance OCZ tell us that “hot” data resides on the ultra-fast SSD, whilst “cold” data is stored on the HDD – apparently advanced caching algorithms learn your computer’s behaviour and enhances your system for responsiveness, which basically means frequently accessed data stored on the hybrid device such as the operating system and application files will be automatically sent to the the solid-state drive, whilst data which you access rarely will be transferred to the hard disk drive.
Specs are a little confusing, but according to the official OCZ press release the RevoDrive Hybrid removes the SATA bottleneck and will allow for bandwidth of up to 910MB/s and is also capable of 120,000 IOPS. Here is what OCZ have to say about its exciting new product:
“The RevoDrive Hybrid leverages the best attributes of both solid state drives and traditional hard drive technology to deliver dynamic data-tiering on a single easy to deploy PCIe storage drive. Leveraging Dataplex software to efficiently manage frequently accessed data delivers superior performance and capacity, making the RevoDrive Hybrid the ideal solution for high performance computing and media content creation.”
By the looks of things there will only be one capacity model available, this will have an MSRP of $499.99 and comes with a three-year warranty. This is not a lot when you consider the prices of SSDs today, let’s face it most of us only want quick boot up and fast loading applications, this hybrid device should allow for this and we think this kind of technology would be great for next-gen games consoles.
Do you think hybrid drives have a strong future?
*Identifying Monetised Links - outgoing links that we monetise are marked with an '*' symbol.
