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OCZ Synapse 60 GB Caching SSD |
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Value and Conclusion
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| 9.5 | OCZ's Synapse Caching SSD is truly an impressive product. It enables you to get near-SSD performance from a hard disk, of any size, multiple TBs are no problem. Installation of the software is easy and can be completed even by novice users. On the other hand there are no tweakable parameters for power users, not that we saw any need for manual tweaking - the drive combo performed great out of the box. The biggest limitation of the Dataplex software is certainly that it can only work with the system boot drive and not with multiple drives, which would benefit advanced users greatly. In terms of raw performance we see about a x2.5 improvement in performance from the HDD+SSD combo, when compared to the HDD alone. The combo's performance is still a bit behind a "real" SSD setup, but if you consider that you could pair a 2 TB HDD with the 60 GB OCZ Synapse and end up with a huge fire-and-forget performance improvement for your big drive, the advantage is obvious. OCZ is asking $155 for the Synapse, which does not seem cheap when compared to a 120 GB SSD, which clocks in at about the same price. So if you can live with only 120 GB of fast storage, then a pure SSD solution is the way to go. The more space you need, the better the price/performance ratio of the HDD+SSD combo when compared to an SSD-only setup. Overall I'm impressed by OCZ's Synapse SSD, it seems that HDD caching might end up being the next big thing for SSDs, fusing large capacity, low price per GB of HDDs and outstanding performance of SSDs. Or to quote our news editor btarunr: "I would kill for a 1 TB storage that's as fast as that". |
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