PCMark05: Revodrive 3 X2 Performance

[I.M.O.G.]

Anyone with revodrives around here?

 

I have a Revodrive 3 X2 480GB (Intel NAND) currently and I'm trying to figure out why the performance is limited to 133MB/s or less for General Usage.

 

That is roughly the same score I got with my old Revo:

Revodrive X2 100GB 130MB/s: http://hwbot.org/submission/2231703_i.m.o.g._pcmark_2005_fx_8120_30876_marks

Revodrive X2 100GB 116MB/s: http://hwbot.org/submission/2234747_i.m.o.g._pcmark_2005_fx_6100_19829_marks

 

This review has results of Revodrive 3 X2 240GB (Micron NAND) - 132MB/s: http://www.funkykit.com/about-us/8962-review-ocz-revodrive-3-x2-240gb-pcie-ssd.html?start=4

 

I see other people running Revodrives with better Gen Usage results.

 

Sweet 906MB/s Gen Usage (Revodrive 3 X2 480GB): http://hwbot.org/image/739126.jpg

HybridChiller 804.6MB/s Gen Usage (Revodrive X2 960GB): http://hwbot.org/submission/2190304_hybridchiller_pcmark_2005_2x_xeon_x5550_36333_marks

 

Anyone else with Revodrives that can run General Usage and give further examples of Revodrive PCM05 performance? Other than a couple exceptionally good General Usage scores, I can't find any other examples of good scores on Revodrives.

[Christian Ney]

Same here, I tested a Revodrive3 x2 once and perf in general usage was also something like 133 mb/s only.

[knopflerbruce]

Tried to increase the pcie frrequency a little bit? Just to see if the issue is related to that.

[I.M.O.G.]

Thank you for sharing christian. Helps to know I am not alone.

 

I have knopflerbruce. On my areca 1882ix performance scales along with pcie freq - it is a small percentage increase for each mhz. It doesn't make any difference as far as I can tell for the revodrive... certainly it doesn't make up for 600 or 700MB/s.

 

One thing about these revos is obvious - different models use different numbers of nand. The 240gb edition has many empty nand banks. The 480 and up have all banks populated.

 

Another is less obvious - the 240gb edition uses micron nand, the 480gb edition uses Intel nand.

 

I have ran the suite of ssd benchmarks on the revo 480gb, and my performance is what it should be - noticeable improvement across the board over the 240gb version.

 

This is not reflected at all in general usage performance however. Sweet hasn't been active in a few days, but I bet he may help if he knows any tricks... the revo is pretty simple tho. I don't know how much there really is to tweak.

[S_A_V]

Tried old RevoDrive x2 100Gb one year ago, got only 170-175 Mb/s in General Usage and 347 Mb/s Virus Scan.

Used first (highest) PCI-E x16 slot on motherboard for RevoDrive.

May be it is related to caching.

Discrete RAID-controllers use onboard RAM for cache.

Integrated (onboard) RAID-controllers use software cache (Intel RST / AMD RAID BIOS).

Revodrive don't use any cache, except some small memory inside SandForce controller.

[I.M.O.G.]

Thanks s_a_v, appreciate your experience also.

 

I agree, I feel like it has to have something to do with caching. The really big Gen usage scores are mostly done by mikecdm, stevero, and myself (we all have multiple big Gen usage submissions) - all with discrete raid with onboard ram caching. For whatever reason, onboard Raid boosts virus scan, but it does not do that well on Gen usage.

 

There are a couple exceptions however, and all of those I am aware of are done with revodrives.

 

I am going to keep trying different things, will report back anything I can figure out.

Edited April 8, 2012 by I.M.O.G.

[Stelaras]

I have for testing one revodrive 3 x2 also . The 480GB version.

 

General usage maxes around 150MB ... and virus scan at 200Mb .

 

I'd love to hear from Sweet how he manages to get 900mb general ...

[I.M.O.G.]

Virus scan can vary a lot I think. I was getting 275 or so.

 

I didn't pay much attention because it can't compete in virus scan. In general usage it shows potential... though its beginning to look very rare/exceptional.

[amdnord]

bump!

 

just curious about the revodrive3 x2.

[I.M.O.G.]

I will update with more results and testing, probably tonight.

 

I'll be trying to replicate the super high gen usage scores, or at least higher than 500MB/s in general usage.

 

It sounds like everyone who has tried has never gotten higher than 200MB/s gen usage on the Revo, except a couple great submissions.

 

I have some ideas to try however. Anyone have a tip on the best way to quickly "refresh" these drives? On the vertex3 maxiops I would use the bootable tools from OCZ to do a secure erase... Its a pain to do that however as it takes time. Any quicker way to do a secure erase on these and get back to original performance levels?

Edited April 12, 2012 by I.M.O.G.

[I.M.O.G.]

For those interested, here are the quick tests on the Revo performance.

 

This one is for comparison, the Areca 1882IX with 3x Raid0 Maxiops:

[ATTACH]1228[/ATTACH]

 

These are the revo3 x2 480GB:

 

[ATTACH]1229[/ATTACH]

 

[ATTACH]1230[/ATTACH]

 

[ATTACH]1231[/ATTACH]

 

[ATTACH]1232[/ATTACH]

 

[ATTACH]1233[/ATTACH]

[pro]

yeah good idea, with the maxiops I also had to secure erase it before the performance was nice,

 

i never found the revodrive good for much more than harddrive startup, but its perfect for that

[I.M.O.G.]

Thanks for chiming in - seems almost everyone with experience hasn't gotten the revo running real quick.

 

I let someone borrow my 100GB revo a while back, in hopes they could do something right that I was missing... They found the same I did.

 

I think there is a trick to making it scream in general usage. Unless Sweet's score wasn't repeatable, and just a one time exceptional score - I doubt that is the case though. I've never seen general usage bug high. Hybridchiller had used alternative drivers for the old revo he was on, which I tried as well, but it had no advantage on my rig. He gave me some pointers, but everything I tried didn't help to reproduce a good gen usage.

 

I'm going to play around with different installs and pagefile settings.

[pro]

well theres always things we havn't thought of yet, so probably just one of the endless tweaks possible in pcm05

[I.M.O.G.]

I agree, I think it might be something however that no one really knows what it takes - just on the right OS config, it screams. I had talked a lot with Sweet about his result before - he had multiple storage drives for his submission, so I had wanted to make sure the Revo was the one used on gen usage. I think hybridchiller made a solid effort to help me get the same sort of results too, but nothing he suggested actually worked on my setup. There's an X factor somewhere methinks. Just gotta find it.