OCZ Storage Solutions RevoDrive 3 Series 120GB PCI-Express Gen. 2 x4 Solid State Drive (SSD) with OCZ VCA 2.0, 3 yr warranty - RVD3-FHPX4-120G

When these came out, they beat the industry. I've been watching the field of "ram drives" for decades. This was the first 'persistent' drive I encountered. And our PC's booted in seconds ( not minutes ). We started using these back in the days of windows XP - up to I think windows 7 ? or Vista? Not sure. Later on, OCZ made the terrible decision to ONLY make these work with "windows" and not linux or other operating systems. Worse decision they ever made. It crushed them. Then Toshiba came along and bought out the company. Later on, companies like samsung built better ssd's ( like NVMe ) and now rule the world, while everyone else tries to catch up. These are old, but man were they great. We had them in our entire enterprise and loved them. We could clone drive to driver internally in minutes. I did full blown database backups ( that used to take 9 hours ), down to 14 minutes. Good times. These are probably no longer in production, but i can not say enough good about them, back in the day.

I recently purchased the OCZ Revo Drive 3 240GB PCIe as an upgrade for my Intel X58 based gaming system. I am using it as the primary boot drive for the OS, Applications, and Games. While the drive was somewhat of a pain to setup initially, I am very pleased with the result. Installation of Windows 7 Ultimate from a USB Drive only took a couple minutes. System startup, shutdown, and application load times is also significantly improved.I however cannot give the drive a 5 star rating because of a very poor experience during the initial setup. Included in the box is a CD with an electronic manual and drivers, a quick start guide was desperately lacking. If you were using the drive to configure a new system, it would not be possible to read the PDF manual on the CD which is a huge over site on OCZ's part in my opinion.I installed the PCIe drive and booted into my motherboards BIOS to ensure it was detected. The motherboard should detect the drive similar to a SCSI card and some motherboards you may have to enable the option boot for third party cards. Thankfully in my case the drive was detected and I was able to select it as the primary boot option. I inserted a USB Thumb Drive with the Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 installer, selected the drive in the boot menu, and was able to successfully start the Windows setup.This is where things got a bit tricky. Windows 7 Ultimate X64 SP1 would not detect the drive at installation despite loading the driver on the CD. I downloaded the most recent driver from the OCZ website [...], extracted it to the USB thumb drive to try again. Windows would not properly detect the driver in the root of the driver folder, and only i386 and amd64 options were listed (this is an Intel X64 not AMD64). After searching the OCZ forums I discovered that the amd64 folder is the one to select (OCZ should have named it x64 instead). This time the drive was detected and I was able to proceed with the installation. Windows installed very quickly and only took 2 minutes. Things have been running great since and I have not had any problems with the drive.I am not one to write reviews but wanted to share my experience in hopes that it may save others the same frustration during setup. The product itself is awesome, fast doesn't even begin to describe it, but OCZ needs to update their drivers disk and include a Quick Start Guide to help with the installation woes.

I got this for $179 when is was on sale, but with it being such a great buy I wouldn't hesitate to purchase @ $300 if it's what you need. Synthetic benchmarks on my computer show that I am getting above the rated Read and Write values, but there is a trick to it. Under normal operation you'll never see values like that. The benchmark software uses multithreaded operations that can saturate the throughput on the drive very easily. This however doesn't mean that you won't see awesome real life performance. I have mine sandwiched between two EVGA GTX 670 FTW graphics cards on an Asus Rampage IV Extreme motherboard and it does get a little warm, but I have had no issues at all since the initial install and cloning my original SSD. A lot of people say you can't clone a normal SSD to this one, but if your BIOS sees the RevoDrive and can accept it as a boot drive it will work just fine. You'll just need to make sure that the software you are using will work properly. For me the cloning process was effortless, but i did use paid software to do so (paragon hard disk manager 12 professional).You'll want to make sure that your motherboard can boot to PCI-e devices and will support any of the Revo Drives as boot a device. I think it's safe to say that any motherboards that were built in the last year are going to work just fine, but verify if you can. Boot times are longer because it takes 5-8 seconds for the firmware to initialize before the operating system will begin to boot. I don't feel this is a negative at all, but there are some people that won't like this. This drive does support TRIM and its SCSI equivalent, dubbed UNMAP. Windows 7, however, does not support TRIM or UNMAP with this drive because Windows 7 only supports TRIM and/or UNMAP with AHCI devices. The RevoDrive 3 is seen as a Storport device, like other high-performance buses, such as fibre channel buses, and RAID adapters. Windows 8 does support TRIM and Smart for Storport devices so this might push you to make the move to Windows 8 sooner than later.Overall I think this has truly been the best SSD I've owned. I don't get BSOD and speeds are consistent across the board for the past few months. One way I've tried to maintain the lifespan of my SSDs is by configuring a RAM Disk to store all computer Temp data/files that are accessed regularly as well as any internet files, browser profiles and extensions or applications that are very write intensive and have a small footprint. This can be easily accomplished with NTFS Junction Points, or just simple changes to where things are stored by default, or by installing them on the RAM disk in the first place.