[Brian]

OCZ has released its Synapse Cache Series 2.5” SSDs designed to bring SSD speed across large hard drives. The Synapse Cache SSDs use Dataplex cache software from NVELO to dynamically cache the most frequently requested files on the hard drive, delivering them much more quickly from the on-board NAND rather than the hard drive's platters.

Full Story

[mike2h]

i assume the software is on the ssd. wonder how much space this actually takes up. any idea which of their drives they used for this? or to new to know yet..

[Brian]

Probably a derivation of an Agility 3, but not entirely sure. We're hoping to get both caching solutions in soon to see how they do.

[[ETA]MrSpadge]

Anand says they have 50% overprovisioning, which seems extreme to me. Anyway, useable capacity would then be 32 and 64 GB.

MrS

[mike2h]

wonder if the yare still going to charge for full capacity. does that much overprovisioning mean they have concerns about durability?

[Brian]

All the OP would be to protect the life of the drive considering it's expected to go through a huge increase in writes when compared to a normal SSD. I'm not sure how much they're estimating, but I'd guess by a factor of 5-10.

[MRFS]

I tend to agree with the comment above about lots of WRITEs.

Just off the top of my head, without doing any more research,
all browsers write every downloaded file to a temporary file cache,
and Windows also utilizes a page swapping file "pagefile.sys".

So, anytime the OS or any application program WRITEs to "cold" storage,
that WRITE must be copied to "hot" storage in the SSD.

Frankly, I don't get very excited about their performance measurements.

By comparison, we exceeded 300 MB/second with 2 x WD2503ABYX "RE4" HDDs
wired to a Highpoint RocketRAID 2720SGL in the x16 slot of an ASRock G41M-S3:




A key factor in the latter result is the 64 MB cache IN EACH HDD
+ in RAID 0 the effective HDD cache is 128 MB.


MRFS

[[ETA]MrSpadge]

SSDs are not only about STR, but rather about "top notch STR + random performance from another world". Atto is purely sequential, if I remember correctly.

MrS

[MRFS]

Please see their own measurements here:

http://www.ocztechno...ii-2-5-ssd.html

Downloads
Product Sheet

http://www.ocztechno...oduct_sheet.pdf


The largest "real-world" results I see in the benchmarks above are:

HDD6 Media Center 297 MB/second -- PC Mark Vantage, Synapse 64GB SSD + 1TB HDD

HDD6 Media Center 285 MB/second (Third Run) -- PC Mark Vantage with Synapse 128GB

HDD6 Media Center 298 MB/second (Second Run) -- PC Mark Vantage with Synapse 64GB


NOT ONE TEST SURPASSED 300 MB/second.


I can do much better with lots of RAM, RamDisk Plus from SuperSpeed LLC,
and a little memory management e.g. moving browser caches to such a ramdisk




MRFS

[[ETA]MrSpadge]

Obviously a RAMDisk will always rock in terms of performance - but that's not really a proper comprison, isn't it?

MrS