Crucial Announces Adrenaline SSD Cache Drive
Crucial has announced the release of its Adrenaline SSD Cache Solution designed to be used as a cache drive along with a standard mechanical hard drive.
The Crucial Adrenaline Solid State Cache Solution comprises of a 50GB Crucial m4 SSD, a 3.5" adapter bracket, and caching software. When paired with another drive (more commonly used with a HDD), Adrenaline intelligently places, or caches, the most frequently needed files on the SSD and keeps less frequently used files on the hard drive. This allows for users to have best of both worlds: SSD-like performance with the high capacity offered by a traditional hard drive. Crucial has not released pricing or performance expectation for this drive but is expected to be announced in the coming weeks.

"Many PC users are reluctant to give up their high-capacity hard drives for the performance of a solid state drive," said Robert Wheadon, worldwide senior product manager, Crucial. "Crucial Adrenaline offers these consumers an affordable bridge between hard drives and solid state drives, so they won't be forced to choose capacity over performance, or vice versa."
The Crucial Adrenaline SSD Cache drive will be backed by a limited three-year warranty and is expected to be available in the first quarter of 2012.
You could, I am assuming this (like other dedicated cache drives) has a faster IOPS rating than the standard drives. Also, the 50GB means that there will be more error recovery, and longer life span for the higher demands of caching vs regular system drive use (more reads/writes on a cache drive than a system drive).
Toms, does the inclusion of software mean that this will work with any chipset? Or is it still tied to z68 boards?
So this product is for people who can't manage that terribly difficult task...
But really, buy a good flash drive and forget about it. Enjoy gaming/computing this weekend folks!
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2TB of SSD would cost A LOT less than 2TB of ram, just saying...
But of course that is only if you price per GB, good thing they don't!
Remember when they used to stick RAM sticks onto a PCI adapter a few years back, you would get MAYBE 8GB of ram for hundreds of dollars. Now they have the OCZ Revo drives that are way more reliable and affordable per GB.
The downside is that these drives are MLC and the very nature of caching means a ton of writes back and forth which is not very healthy for nand flash. OCZ went so far as to disable half of their cache drives size for redundant shadowing. Apparently Crucial isn't as concerned about this.
You can already find reviews of the Synapse out there. It's quite impressive that a single 32GB cache can give your entire HDD SDD type performance.
Personally for me, I still think Intel's 20GB SLC + SRT is the way to go for caching, but again if you don't own Z68 or if you have an existing system and just want to add the speed of SSDs without the troubles of reinstalling or cloning these are great options.