The folks from OCZ were present at the Intel Developer Forum last week, demonstrating their latest wares while situated somewhat uncomfortably across from Intel's big 3D XPoint display. The highlight of their booth was an early mock-up of an upcoming product: the RevoDrive 400.
OCZ has a history of selling PCIe-based RevoDrive products to anyone who will pay for them, including PC enthusiasts, but this sort of storage tech is finally maturing into an option with broad appeal. The RevoDrive 400 is slated for release in the fourth quarter of this year and looks to take full advantage of the latest standards.
The drive pops into an M.2 slot—or into a PCIe adapter card as shown above—and can use up to four lanes of PCI Express connectivity. This is a true NVMe device, not a legacy AHCI one, and that support comes courtesy of a Toshiba controller chip. This potent mix of storage tech grants the RevoDrive 400 read speeds as high as 2000MB/s and write speeds around 1600-2000MB/s. We've only ever measured sequential transfer speeds that fast from Intel's pricey data center drives, so if the RevoDrive 400 can live up to its specs, it should be quite formidable.
The drive's NAND flash will come from OCZ's parent company, Toshiba, and will be of the 15-nm MLC variety. As a result, these little gumstick-sized drives will hold up to 1TB worth of data each. We'll probably have to wait a few months for the product's release before prices are announced, but I wouldn't expect the new RevoDrive to be a budget option.