With the price-per-gigabyte still too high for most people to use a solid state drive as the primary storage for their PC, tech companies are trying to figure out novel ways to combine the performance advantages of SSDs with the massive storage of today’s hard drives. Gigabyte just showed off a new motherboard that has a 20GB SSD built right into it, and now OCZ is showing off a SSD and hard drive
combination that fits on a PCI Express x4 card.
Dubbed the OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid, the unit takes advantage of the superior throughput of PCI Express, with the SSD component able to serve as a cache for the hard drive. OCZ still hasn’t decided if it will ship the combo device with a 5,400rpm or 7,200rpm hard drive, but it tells TechReport that it will most likely be available with 500GB or 1TB HDDs and 60GB or 120GB SSDs.
OCZ will not be using Intel’s new Smart Response caching technology, claiming that integrating Nvelo’s Dataplex software yields better performance on the PCMark Vantage benchmark. In any event, the RevoDrive Hybrid will feature blazing 575Mbps read speeds and 500Mbps write speeds.
Expect the RevoDrive Hybrid to reach the marketplace in July with a base configuration of 60GB SSD and 500GB hard drive for around $350.
