OCZ Revodrive 3 X2 PCI-Express SSD 480 GB Review - Incoming!

I received an email confirming shipping of my recently ordered OCZ PCI-E SSD. I wanted to pick one of these up to play with to see if it delivers on the pretty astounding capabilities (for a workstation / enthusiast consumer grade device) seen in reviews of pre-production samples. Several of my gaming machines already have dedicated RAID hardware SSD systems, and I've had earlier PCI-E based solutions (e.g. Fusion-IO) that were intended for enterprise use and were priced accordingly.

The latest OCZ offering appears to offer a level of performance equaling and in some cases exceeding these loftily priced solutions, in a form factor that gives the enthusiast gamer a hassle free, no cables, plug-and-play installation. You could perhaps beat the price by building an array of several fast SSD combined with a quality dedicated hardware raid card, but if the unit delivers as promised, why bother?

There was a puzzling delay between OCZ's announcement of availability (I ordered then) and actual availability, but it appears the device is now available at the usual outlets. Unfortunately, either because of supply and demand, or a price change by OCZ at the last minute, the price seems to have jumped almost $200.00 to nearly $1800.00. Fortunately, Amazon is honoring the price I ordered the drive at, saving a few hundred bucks. Good on them!

I chose the 480 GB Revodrive X2 model over the 240 GB Revodrive 3 since it offers dramatic performance increases over the previous generation, much more so than the non-X2 models. This is not to say the non-X2 240 GB does not offer worthwhile benefits over the earlier version, just that it is not nearly as dramatic of a boost as the X2, which has double the controllers and nearly double the IOPS capability and double the data throughput rate in some cases via its mezzanine card architecture when compared to the non-X2 240 GB model.

Unfortunately, due to some marketing typos further promulgated by pre-release reviews, gamers were led to believe there would be a 240 GB model of the X2 at a much more affordable price compared to the larger capacities. Such is not the case, and OCZ has corrected their media to reflect this.

I intend to focus specifically on any benefits the card brings to gamers as far as load times and any enhancement in game performance (e.g., streaming of textures).

Is it worth the $1800.00 price of entry, or for that matter the $650.00 cost for the smaller and lower performance 240 GB Revodrive 3 for use in games?

Stay tuned for the review in the next week or so!

Rob