Crucial Adrenaline Solid State Cache Review

vroom 2012-05-17 02:21:30 UTC #1

I just posted the article Crucial Adrenaline Solid State Cache Review..

MyCE takes a closer look on the Crucial Adrenaline Solid State Cache drive. The Crucial Adrenaline drive is an easy solution to boost your system performance, without any compromises on the capacity, and also without re-installing your OS. You can find out all about the performance on the Crucial Adrenaline on this review.


Read the full article here: [http://www.myce.com/review/crucial-adrenaline-solid-state-cache-review-61627/](http://www.myce.com/review/crucial-adrenaline-solid-state-cache-review-61627/)

Feel free to add your comments below. 

Please note that the reactions from the complete site will be synched below.

blegs38552 2012-05-17 06:41:00 UTC #2

I have one old PC that only supports the original SATA specification. Could I use this type of drive to boost the performance even if it doesn’t equal the numbers achieved on a more current machine?

Arachne 2012-05-17 08:34:31 UTC #3

Nice job vroom, looks like a very nifty piece of kit that either of my machines could benefit from - saves buying an SSD for each one

vroom 2012-05-17 09:34:30 UTC #4

[QUOTE=blegs38552;2634548]I have one old PC that only supports the original SATA specification. Could I use this type of drive to boost the performance even if it doesn’t equal the numbers achieved on a more current machine?[/QUOTE]

Hi blegs38552

You will get the max of your SATA connection and it should work on all machines, however the Software will only work ok Windows 7 so make sure that you have windows 7 install.

bigmike7 2012-05-18 05:53:21 UTC #5

Yo vroom-

Excellent review - they are available here:

And also at www.newegg.com

olyteddy 2012-05-18 12:28:28 UTC #6

Very interesting concept. I wonder if NVELO, the software behind this, will be releasing a version to apply to existing SSD installations. It would be nice if they did and added the capability to cache non-system drives. I currently have an Intel 520 available as a boot and system disk and a spare OCZ Agility 3 I could use to cache my 2GB data and lesser programs disk.

Sean 2012-05-18 15:14:26 UTC #7

Nice review The main point I like with this drive is the ease of use - Just install it in the PC, install the software and reboot. This is certainly a lot easier than installing a dedicated SSD with typical user installations where they must move off most of excess data to be able to reduce the OS partition to fit on their new SSD, not to mention having to run a cloning process.

NVELO is actually working on secondary HDD support, but at the moment it is still in beta, based on me recently contacting them. Hopefully once they have a stable release, it will be available to existing Crucial Adrenaline customers.

It would also be nice if NVELO made Dataplex available as a standalone software package, where users can choose their own SSD. For example, for users who upgraded their 32GB/64GB SSD to a larger model, that small SSD would be perfect as a cache SSD. One drawback is that many early SSDs do not perform well when filled to 100% of their user-capacity, as the caching software makes full use of the user-capacity for caching from what I’m aware of.

Dee 2012-05-18 15:22:21 UTC #8

An excellent review.

There is no substitute for having the OS and all the applications/games on a large capacity SSD, but then again, not everyone can afford a large capacity SSD.

This solution is a very neat IMO, and you should certainly see a tangible difference is speed from a caching SSD than running the system from an HDD only.

vroom 2012-05-23 03:45:06 UTC #9

@Auzzie Kid

with 75% full had no impact on the test, also i could put the PC into sleep mode and resume without any issues.

alan1476 2012-05-28 08:47:14 UTC #10

Excellent review vroom. This is indeed a good work around for people with spinners that want them to work faster. IMHO.

Two_Degrees 2012-05-28 10:24:28 UTC #11

This seems a lot faster than the performance I’m getting out of Asus/Marvell’s SSD caching implementation.

vroom 2012-05-28 10:35:06 UTC #12

[QUOTE=alan1476;2635735]Excellent review vroom. This is indeed a good work around for people with spinners that want them to work faster. IMHO.:)[/QUOTE]

I am working on finding an old PC to test the drive again. If all goes well it should be and AMD athlon x2 from 2007. Fingers crossed.

[QUOTE=Two Degrees;2635749]This seems a lot faster than the performance I’m getting out of Asus/Marvell’s SSD caching implementation.[/QUOTE]

What motherboard you have? Also the marvel controller isnt performing as good as the native Intel.
BTW, are you satisfied with that solution?

Two_Degrees 2012-05-28 10:42:15 UTC #13

[QUOTE=vroom;2635751]I am working on finding an old PC to test the drive again. If all goes well it should be and AMD athlon x2 from 2007. Fingers crossed.

What motherboard you have? Also the marvel controller isnt performing as good as the native Intel.
BTW, are you satisfied with that solution?[/QUOTE]

I have the Asus P9X79 WS board. The Marvell controller isn’t the best as it’s PCI-E 1x and so limited to 5Gb/s. I have noticed a speed up in application launching and file explorer browsing, but that Dataplex implementation looks a LOT better.