Welcome to an unboxing of an SSD that might seem confusing on the surface, but
is actually well a little bit confusing, but very,
very cool. This is the impossible to
open. Okay, hold on. This is the OCZ Synapse
Cache SSD. So, this is not intended at
all to be used to install an operating system or any software directly on this
drive. You're not supposed to do that. What you're supposed to do with this 64
gig drive is you are supposed to use it
as a cache for your hard drive. And so, you go, "Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, uh, Intel
SRT. I've heard of that before." And I say, "No, not Intel SRT. This SSD is not
intended for use with Intel SRT. It is actually intended for use with OCZ's
Dataplex software. So what Dataplex does
is it is B well okay it's very similar to how
Intel SRT functions in that it allows your OS to manage um the caching of data
through an SSD rather than just writing and reading everything directly to and
from the hard drive. So, why would you use Dataplex is the question? Because
you could just buy a Z68
uh motherboard and then you could run
SRT. What if you don't have a Z68 motherboard? What if you want to have an
X79 platform, which by the way, even though it's the higherend Intel chipset,
does not support SRT? Well, then you're starting to look into a different
solution. So, something like Dataplex. So, why this SSD? What's special about
this SSD? And I'll tell you guys now, the only thing that's special about this
SSD is the durability. So, what OCZ has
done is they've taken an SSD that is actually a 128 gig SSD, and they've gone
and they've put 64 gigs.
Wait, no, hold on. How does it work? No, right. They've taken a 64 gig SSD,
that's what's actually here in the package, and then they have overprovisioned half of the capacity of
this drive for wear leveling. So, what
that means is it appears to your operating system as a 32 gig drive if
you ever actually plug it in directly, which you should never do because it's a cache SSD. But the reason for that is
that because of the limited write cycles on these SSDs, OCZ has gone, okay, well,
let's take half of the capacity and let's squirrel it away so that because
this is going to be used with a hard drive and it's going to have things
cashing in and out of it all the time, we're going to make sure that it's got
half of that capacity stored away. So that even if we have to write to it and
write to it and write to it constantly, we are going to keep the drive safe and
keep it functioning for a much longer period of time. So, this is a
sandforce-based SATA 3 drive, but it
uses a special firmware to hide half of the capacity. And then it comes with a
license. So, I'm just going to cover up the license key, but it's on there, believe me. It comes with a license for
the OCZ Dataplex software, which installs on Windows 7. So, let me just
see if there's anything else that I'm missing here. Right. So, what else is
included? We've got one of those 2 and 1/2 in to 3 and 1/2 in adapters here.
We've got some mounting screws. If you wanted to put this in
Oh, OCZ. OCZ. If you wanted to put it in
a notebook, you could use these mounting screws, but you're probably Oh, no. You
Okay, I guess you could use them to mount this to that. Okay.
No, no, you couldn't. Okay. Well, this is not for a notebook. This is more for
a desktop. You got a little sticker here, and you got Oh, there's the Datalex license key. I'll make sure I
use that before I post this unboxing. So, you're also going to want to make sure that you stay tuned on my NCIXCOM
channel because what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this drive. I'm going to run it with Intel SRT um on a WD
black 2 TB hard drive as the boot drive. Then I'm going to run it not using SRT.
I'm going to use the Datlex software, which by the way is supposedly, I
haven't tried it yet, much easier to install and set up than Intel SRT. and
we're going to see which of those two caching solutions learns faster and
allows your system to perform better. So, I'm very excited about that. And
thank you for checking out my unboxing of the Synapse Cache Drive from OCZ.
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