OCZ Synapse 64GB Solid State Cache Review

When we looked at the RevoDrive Hybrid earlier in the year, it was clear that the caching principle is an effective way to go by utilising the speed of an SSD and pairing it with the capacity of a traditional mechanical drive. Since then we have seen this stripped back a little with users now able to buy the cache on its own an set it up with a drive of their choice (upto 2TB) or integrate it into an existing setup to give a boost in performance at a much reduced cost.

The Synapse as we’ve noted is a ground up build and not based on any previous drive that has been modified for caching purposes. This is why, whilst the drive on the box has 64GB of capacity, the firmware works in such a way that the cache in effect is only 32GB to the system, this is there to act as a barrier against performance degradation in the long term.

Given the fact that the user can chose their own drive the need to buy a higher performance hard drive in the first case (when building a new setup for example) isn’t key as the SSD part will bring this right up in line with its own performance. Talking about performance, the drive itself could do with a bit more working in order to raise the cached speeds a little more, and more so on the write speeds, the principle of upgrading is to increase speeds, not drop them back. This said, the Synapse is more of a budget option and so there are one or two sacrifices to be made. Those that are worried about it complexity to set-up need not worry, whilst the Dataplex software may seem daunting to get setup, its a simple install and forget operation and once enable runs entirely in the background with no user intervention required.

There are other solutions on the market for drive caching that either perform in a similar way to this or like the RevoDrive Hybrid are of a different design, but of the solutions that involve purely the cache drive, this is the only one that is build ground up in this way to perform as it does and so the £56 can be justified a lot easier for what is on offer. If the 32GB capacity doesn’t sound enough however, don’t fear as there is also a 128GB (64GB) drive also available for around the £80 mark

Bottom line, the Synapse cache drive is the first in what will hopefully be a number of newly designed cache solutions offering the performance with the protection against degradation in the long run and given its new design has a reasonable price point, this surely makes it worth of our bang for buck award.