OCZ's PCI-E SSDs may not have grabbed many headlines over the years but the new RevoDrive 350 aims to change that in a big way. Under the watchful eye of Toshiba, OCZ has effectively narrowed their focus by targeting key segments rather than taking the 'let's have something for everyone? approach of yesteryear. This plan has moved the company towards a healthier business plan while Toshiba's tutelage is rebuild consumer confidence in the OCZ brand as a whole. The RevoDrive 350 is a cornerstone of their strategy.

The RevoDrive line has a long and rather illustrious history in the PCI-E storage marketplace. When other companies were mainly concerned with wooing the enterprise consumers with high cost drives, OCZ was busy pitching the merits of PCI-E based SSDs to the workstation market and enthusiasts who simply wanted a ton of speed. To that end, the RevoDrive tended to play up features like TRIM, ease of use, lower CPU overhead and its use as a bootable drive, all things which many higher priced competitors lacked. This led to the RevoDrive making inroads within general consumer psyche without alienating their devices? core market.

With SATA revision 3.2 and its associated SATA Express sub-spec on the horizon, there is mounting pressure on the 'classic' PCI-E SSD manufactures to beef up their product stacks. While innovation has been the driving force of the PCI-E SSD marketplace for quite some time, most of these innovations have been targeted towards boot-ability, generalized housekeeping, and improving short / long term performance. What has been missing is value. This is especially true when companies like OCZ look at what Plextor's M6e has accomplished on the price for performance front. This certainly makes the release of the OCZ's RevoDrive 350 rather serendipitous since it aims to bring a true high performance, high value option to consumers who don't have a $2000 - or even $1000 - burning a hole in their pockets.