OCZ's Revo Drive Hybrid - fast, but expensive

It’s fun to come up with new pairings of technology. We’ve seen SSD storage before, we’ve even seen the use of system RAM as a storage device, but what happens when you marry an SSD and platter drive? The Hybrid is born.

The OCZ Hybrid isn’t the first of its kind however, that honour goes to Seagate and the Momentus series. OCZ are however the first to implement hybrid drive technology on the PCI bus, giving a theoretical increase to drive performance without the restrictions of running two drives over a single SATA port.

Whether or not this idea has had any noticeable benefit over the Momentus drives was not clear to us before testing, but after plugging both drives into our system, we quickly got to work finding out whether or not OCZ’s new release was worth pulling out a graphics card for.

As for how this technology works, it’s rather simple, and essentially the same as Intel Rapid Storage Technology ^TM, just on a single PCB instead of over two separate drives. The SSD works as a caching device, and stores data from the platter drive temporarily in order to be quickly retrieved, increasing system performance. You can also set up each drive independently, which is what we did in order to read the speed of each drive individually, though this is not how the drive is intended to be used.

If you do set up each drive independently, the 1TB platter drive performs around as fast as your average 5,400RPM 5.25in hard drive, and really leaves a lot to be desired. The SSD however is around the speed of a OCZ Vertex II, give or take a few MB/s. So if for some reason you would like a decent 100GB SSD and a slow 1TB separate storage, it is possible to set up with this card, however we strongly suggest using Intel RST, and making the most of SSD caching.

So here is the burning question, is this drive worth owning? Well, to be honest you can buy a 100 GB SSD and separate 1TB platter drive for considerably less, so no, this drive is definitely not for everyone. However, if for some reason you don’t want to make use of your 2.5in/3.5in bays, or already have them occupied, this drive is a fairly decent solution.