Reviews - Corsair Accelerator Series SSD Cache (60GB)

[krazy_olie]

so if this drive is used to cache any drive. can you use it to cache an SSD drive? will it improve the speed of them too, or does it just work with mechanical spinny ones?


the 'primary volume' thing - is that only for C: drive, or is it any drive thats marked as primary in the disk management? because all of my 4 drives are marked as primary. and my 640GB games drive might want boosting up a bit and not the C: drive.
It takes quite a while reinstalling all 70 of my games (ive got another 40 or so not installed at the moment, but im working on it), so somethig like this would work wonders. Because a 500GB+ SSD costs waaaaay to much and i like having all my games installed at once so i can play what i want when i want. (thats one reason someone would want one of these, seen as people are asking that queston)

It's dependant on whether the drive is a windows boot drive. It will only cache the drive that has windows installed on it, according to nvelo though if you have partitions on this drive they will be cached too http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-St.../m-p/92548#M97

but that would mean i'd have to get a new motherboard, cpu and memory. and then reinstall everything etc. and at the end of the day still have less storage on my primary drive.

this seems like an ideal solution to speed up an aging system and i'm seriously tempted, particulary by the 30gig one. i have 1tb primary drive, loads of steam games etc so using that would surely be better than trying to micromanage install locations of individual games in steam.

What I would like to know though is if it speeds up boot time and more importantly resume from hibernation

Yes, boot times should get much faster. As for hibernation I think it would depend how it's set up, exactly but if you are talking about hibernation when the pc powers down then yes it should.

I shall be trying one of these out at the weekend so I shall report then!

[Major_Trouble]

Am I missing something? It's almost the same price as a SSD drive. The only thing this is doing is helping people who are lazy to reinstall OS on a new SSD.

Has FAIL written all over it?

Not necessarily for lazy people. Some might not have the ability or time to go through a complete re-install / patch etc. Maybe they can't find their Win 7 disk....ahem. I would certainly consider this option for one of my friends or families machines so I don't have to go through the whole install routine for someone else.

The other benefit for this configuration is if your cache drive fails you only lose the speed boost and still have a bootable / useable computer. As your main HDD drive fills up, whatever you are currently accessing will be boosted without any intervention unlike a typical SSD + HDD solution that may require some shuffling of data due to space limitations to keep your access speeds high.

It's an alternative solution and I don't think you can call it a FAIL by an means.

[Major_Trouble]

I disable hibernation on all of my computers with a SSD as my OS drive. They boot up fast enough and I have a 'fresh' OS environment to work / play in.

[krazy_olie]

Quick errata to the review btw.

A bit of research says that the 30gb one uses SF-2141 which is ever so slightly slower and explains the bump in price to 45gb (which supposedly is really 48)

[phili_c51]

I see its benefits, but to be truthful, the PC enthusiasts among us would not have any issues using an SSD for operating system and HDD for long term data storage. Its just a gimic that may sell among novice users/people too lazy to manually switch data between.

[chrestomanci]

From what little information that's available on the DataPlex software this looks like it's Windows7 only - although at least it's both 32bit and 64bit versions. So if you've got older Windows then I suspect you'll be out of luck. As to Mac and Linux - forget it.

For linux check out BCache : http://bcache.evilpiepirate.org/

I have not used it myself, but it claims fairly substantal speed ups by caching your hard drive onto an SSD. Needless to say, there are no silly limitations about the size or number of hard drives your cache, and any SSD will work, not just a fancy 'Accelarator' model.

[rstars_1]

I dont actually see the point of this. Especially if it costs the same amount as a normal ssd?

[chrestomanci]

The point is that it comes with software that allows you to accelarate a normal hard drive, so if you beleve their claims you can have the speed of a huge SSD as big as your hard drive, for the price of a much smaller one.

As to if you get the claimed speed ups is another matter. I suspect it depends if your frequently accessed programs and data will fit in the SSD, and how close your usage matches the maker's ideal usage.

If you know what you are doing, then you could probably obtain a bigger speedup for less money and with more control by re-installing your OS and selected apps to a normal SSD, and leaving less frequenly used stuff on your old hard drive. But most people are not that confident with that sort of re-install.