OCZ Revodrive Hybrid and Intel Smart Response technology : Specs| Hashrate

Which do you choose, HDD or SSD? Of course, the latter are good, but their price per gigabyte is an order of magnitude higher. Rational enthusiasts successfully combine both types of drives: a solid-state drive for the system and some kind of hard drive for the archive. But you can try to combine both of these options if you use the SSD as a cache for the hard drive.

Some are skeptical about such decisions, they say, why does the system need crutches? It’s good when the budget allows you to put an SSD for everything, but modern software and especially games that you want to place on a fast device can take up a very large volume.

Hybrid use of drives solves the problem of suboptimal use of an expensive resource. Programs and components of the operating system may be unclaimed for months, and the SSD in the role of a cache stores only actively used data. This material is devoted to checking how effectively it works.

Test participants

OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid

At Computex 2011, OCZ presented a unique drive that combines a capacious HDD and a fast SSD on one board. The solid-state part, in fact, is a 128 GB RevoDrive 3 with two SandForce 2200 controllers combined into a RAID-0 array (the RevoDrive 3 X2 with four controllers has already been in the laboratory). Sixteen microcircuits, four of which are for some reason soldered on the other hand, are not very expensive and not very fast asynchronous NAND Flash memory made using 25 nm process technology – the same one used in the Agility 3 SSD series.

All other features such as PCI-E 2.0 x4 interface, SuperScale controller and technology
Virtual Controller Architecture 2.0
also valid. The mezzanine board contains a 2.5 ”Toshiba MK1059GSM hard drive with a capacity of 1 TB and a rotation speed of 5200 rpm.

The board is 167 mm long and is fixed in one slot, the second slot is blocked by a hard disk.

128 GB is the raw capacity of the caching SSD. Part of the available space is reserved at the firmware level for replacing cells that have exhausted their resource. The paper instructions included in the package say that over-provisioning is allocated half the volume, as much as 64 GB.

In fact, this is not the case. The developers decided to find a different balance between the storage resource and the cache size, so the SSD received an available volume of 100 GB, and 28 remains in reserve. These values ​​are indicated in the electronic version of the instructions.

Thanks to VCA technology, OCZ Toolbox can work with the Hybrid SSD and display its basic parameters.

In particular, according to SMART data, it is easy to find out that the drive has already been used. If you compare the serial number on the sticker, you can calculate that 3DNews had “the right of the first night” .

But the information about the hard disk could not be spied on, the OCZ controller does not disclose it.

Intel 520 SSD

Intel’s new product is the successor to the well-deserved 510 series. The Marvell controller gave way to SandForce 2200, and Flash memory switched to a 25 nm process technology. The assortment of the new line consists of models for 60, 120, 180, 240 and 480 GB, I got only the youngest one.

The proprietary firmware differs from many competitors in the presence of the Host Writes parameter – it shows that the drive is new, nothing has ever been written to it. The number of hours in operation is unrealistic, but other parameters are normal.

This drive will act both on its own and as a caching SSD for Intel Smart Response Technology.

WD Caviar Blue

The WD5000AAKX is taken as a sample of the average modern HDD. I have already tested his younger brother with 320 GB, then he left the most favorable impressions. A single 7200 RPM spinning plate, a SATA-III interface, good thermal and acoustic performance, and a low price (at least before the flood in Thailand) make it a good candidate to buy. It participates in the article both as a single disk and as accelerated by means of Smart Response.

The disk was borrowed from an office computer, in which he worked for almost a year. Fortunately, the HDD does not degrade performance over time. SMART does not contain any errors.

WD VelociRaptor

The 600-gigabyte Velociraptor has already been to our area. As you probably know, this is the only 10,000 RPM hard drive with SATA (6Gb / s) interface. All other HDDs or slower, or are connected using SCSI / SAS / FC server interfaces. The drive is a 2.5 “15 mm high disk installed in an IcePack heatsink, which is also an adapter to the generally accepted 3.5” format. The temperature and noise level of this hard drive is much lower than the old Raptors, it does not stand out against the background of ordinary 7K drives.

The price of the older model is about 10,000 rubles, the 300-gigabyte version can be purchased for 5,000. Against the background of ever-cheaper SSDs, such amounts do not look attractive, but as a compromise between capacity, speed and price, it is very good. Ideally suited as a competitor to hybrids.

The specimen obtained for tests is almost new, all attributes are normal.