OCZ announces second SSD caching solution with the Synapse series

[siopao1984]

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OCZ announces second SSD caching solution with the Synapse series by VR-Zone.com

If OCZ's RevoDrive Hybrid is outside of your budget, then its new Synapse series of SSDs might appeal to you as the new range of drives have been designed specifically for SSD caching. The good news is that you don't need chipset level support to take advantage of the SSD caching feature either, as OCZ has integrated software from Dataplex that handles the caching part.

So what makes the Synapse series of SSD's different from any other SSD? Well, OCZ are selling them as 64 and 128GB models, but you only get half of that space thanks to 50 percent overprovisioning. This means that the drive is likely to last longer than the hard drive it'll work in tandem with and OCZ claims a MTBF time of 2 million hours, which oddly enough isn't higher than OCZ's other SSD's, despite the high overprovisioning.



The Synapse series features SATA 6Gbps interface and both models have a rated max read speed of up to 550MB/s whereas the 64GB model has a max write speed of up to 490MB/s while the 128GB should be slightly faster at up to 510MB/s. The max IOPS are slightly lower than for OCZ's other SSD's based on the SandForce SF-2281 controller which is surprising, although the difference isn't that big.

OCZ doesn't supply much information with regards to how the Dataplex caching software works, only that it takes some time for it to build up the cache, as per any other caching system. One slightly different feature is that the Dataplex software can dynamically handle which is stored on the SSD and the hard drive, which seems to suggest that frequently used software might be stored on the SSD rather than the hard drive.

OCZ claims that the drives are available as of now, but we haven't found anyone listing them for sale and OCZ didn't reveal pricing. We're going to try to get a unit in for review and do a comparison with other SSD caching solutions.

Source: OCZ

[kenox]

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