Gadgetory

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 okay yeah yeah Intel SRT I've heard of that before and I say no not until SRT this SSD is not intended for use with Intel SRT it is actually intended for use with OC Z's data plex software so what data Plex does is it is very well okay it's very similar to how Intel SRT functions in that it allows your OS to manage 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 data plexes the question because you could just buy a Zen 68 motherboard and then you could run SRT what if you don't have a Zen 68 motherboard what if you want to have an ex 79 platform which by the way even though it's the higher-end Intel chipset does not support SRT well then you're starting to look into a different solution so something like data Plex 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 else is he has done is they've taken an SSD that is actually a 128 gig SSD and they've run and they've put 64 gigs wait no hold on how does it work no right they've taken a 64 gig SSD is that's what's actually here in the package and then they have over provisioned half of the capacity of this Drive or we're 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 ok well let's take half of the capacity and let's swirl it away so that because this is going to be used with a hard drive and it's going to have things caching 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 SAN force 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 gonna cover up the license key but it's on there believe me it comes with a license for the OCC data plex 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 two and a half inch to three and a half inch adapters here we've got some mounting screws if you wanted to put this in oh oh CZ o CZ 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 thing you've got a little sticker here and you got oh there's the DataFlex 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 NCIX comm channel because what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take this drive I'm gonna run it with Intel SRT on a WD a black 2 terabyte hard drive as the boot drive then I'm going to run it not using SRT I'm going to use the DataFlex software which by the way is supposedly I haven't tried it yet much easier to install and setup than Intel SRT and we're gonna 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 don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech it's from unboxings reviews and other computer videos you