OCZ has introduced its new hybrid drive with 100GB of NAND flash storage and 1TB hard drive space. The drive sports a very fast PCIe interface.
OCZ is claiming the PCIe interface on their new RevoDrive Hybrid can get up to a 910MB/sec sequential read rate. That translates to about 120,000 I/O a second. The only competitor for OCZ in this market is Seagate, offering 25 times less NAND flash memory with an average read rate of only 83.5MB/sec.
Seagate’s interface for their hybrid drives is currently not PCIe. Instead they are using a 3Gbit/sec SATA interface for their Momentus hybrid drives. Those drives also sport only a 4GB flash capacity and that memory is used as a cache to up the read/write performance. The fastest that SATA interfaces can currently operate is 6Gbit/sec, while PCIe can currently get up to as high as 128Gbit/sec. The only high point for Seagate is the price of their hybrid drives. The company has managed to get the drives into the $113 to $156 range making it competitive against vanilla hard disk drives. Intel also has plans to enter the hybrid drive market, but currently production hasn’t been started on the hardware for their offering.
It appears the RevoDrive Hybrid will come bundled with OCZ’s Dataplex software, allowing the drive to manage the use of the flash memory in a dynamic fashion. That means that the most frequently accessed data will remain in flash while less frequently accessed files will be stored on the HDD.
"The RevoDrive Hybrid leverages the best attributes of both solid-state and traditional hard drive technology to deliver dynamic data-tiering on a single easy-to-deploy PCIe storage drive," said Ryan Petersen, CEO of OCZ. "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."
The RevoDrive Hybrid is going to be backed up by a 3 year warranty and comes with a fairly hefty price tag of $499. The only people who are likely to be picking this up right now are those with very high bandwidth applications and maybe gamers. For everyone else, the speed improvements just won’t be noticeable for normal day-to-day tasks.
