I’m the happy owner of a Asus Sabertooth X58 mainboard. Since yesterday, I’m also the happy owner of a OCZ RevoDrive 3 X2 240GB. The later is an SSD running on your PCIE bus. Rather nifty as it bypasses all the SATA3 shenanigans I had with the now two defunct SSD’s sitting in my desk drawer. It also boasts a 1.5 Gigabyte per second read speed and 1.2 Gigabyte per second write speed, with 200’000 IOPS on top of that. So, after this little hardware porn, back to the problem.
It doesn’t work as advertised. First the install was weird. You need to download the driver and put it on a stick or something before you can actually install anything. After booting the Windows 7 disc, it will not find the drive, period. Out comes the USB stick with the driver. Load it and it suddenly finds it. Strangely it refused to install at that point, telling me it can’t create the partition or some such nonsense and that I should check the install log. What log? A reboot and repeat of the process later and it worked just fine.
A completion of the install later and I’m on Windows. Atto comes out and has a crack at it (standard settings, 256MB size and QD4). The excitement builds as the graphs go for larger chunks and then stops. At about 600 MB read and 700 MB write speed it’s done, no speed increases, nothing. No 1.5 Gigabytes by far.
Now I mentioned the mother board for a reason. See there is a little trick here. If you look closely at the specs of the RevoDrive, it says it’s PICe v2. If you check for the same on the motherboard, it says it has PCIe v2. Trouble is, only on the two beige 16x ports. The black 16x port is wired at 4x but it’s only PCIe v1. Guess which port my RevoDrive is sitting in and you will be right.
Lucky I had that second port free, but now the GFX card and the RevoDrive are sitting uncomfortably close. I switched them both around so there is one empty slot between them.
Booting up again, I gave Atto another go. Look what I get now:
