The OCZ RevoDrive 80 GB SSD

The OCZ RevoDrive 80 GB solid state drive has the official part number of OCZSSDPX-1RVD0080. The PX in the part number designates that it is a "PCI Express" drive. It looks like a large PCI Express sound card or graphics card, rather than a 2.5" or 3.5" SATA "drive".

Although it is not your typical SATA solid state drive, it is a bootable drive. However, your motherboard must support booting over PCI Express. In addition, the RevoDrive (which is already a RAID array) usually cannot run simultaneously with the motherboard's onboard RAID controller due to limited option ROM space. Therefore, be sure to check the OCZ RevoDrive Tested Motherboard Guide before you purchase this drive.

The box lists the RevoDrive as a PCI Express 2.0 card, but it actually supports only PCI Express 1.1. What this means is that it only supports a maximum throughput of 8 Gbits/s, instead of 16 Gbits/s. That said, 8 Gbits/s (1 GB/s) is good enough as the RevoDrive is only designed to deliver a maximum throughput of 540 MB/s.

The OCZ RevoDrive is a PCI Express x4 card but will fit and work with PCI Express x16 slots. It will also work in a PCI Express x1 slot, but you don't want to do that as it would throttle the interface throughput to just 2 Gbits/s or 250 MB/s.

Usable Capacity

This OCZ RevoDrive officially has a formatted capacity of 80 GB. We checked that out by formatting both in NTFS using Windows Vista.

The actual formatted capacity was 80,032,559,104 bytes. This is slightly (~32.6 MB) above than the official storage capacity. With about 96 MB allocated to the NTFS file system, the actual usable capacity was about 64 MB below 80 GB.

Let's take a look at its specifications.

Specifications

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