Final Thoughts

Coming from the OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid, we had reasons to remain skeptical well-nigh the viability of SSD caching. However, we are glad to report the Crucial Adrenaline is a much better production. At a third of the price, y'all get a more flexible choice that'south also a off-white fleck faster when paired with a quality hard drive.

For SSD caching to brand sense, information technology must improve performance without breaking the bank and this is why the RevoDrive Hybrid completely missed the point.

The Adrenaline showed overall positive results, but it'south important to empathise what will be sped upwardly and nether what weather condition, and then let's quickly summarize the operation as we saw it.

For copying, compressing or extracting files SSD enshroud technology isn't nearly as effective every bit a standalone SSD. Although we found information technology useless for copying large files that exceed 1GB, it was very effective when working with multiple smaller files, even on the offset run.

The real-world operation gains will vary a lot and the performance will likely depend on how regularly you repeat a task. In our tests, the Windows vii kicking time performance was drastically improved. However if you don't reset for quite some fourth dimension, the load time slows back down. Still, our multi-tasking performance gain was inspiring, even after the start run.

We have yet to test OCZ'due south competing Synapse SSD, but unlike the SandForce controllers, Crucial'due south m4 SSD does not suffer when working with compressed information. The only weakness is that the 64GB model provides insufficiently poor write performance.

With the Crucial Adrenaline we cannot be too critical of the functioning gains because $100 isn't much to pay to improve arrangement functioning, even if it's not across the board. When the Adrenaline is existence effective it's well worth the asking cost and honestly this is a production I would happily purchase for employ in my own arrangement.

The Dataplex software (the licensing role of information technology) isn't perfect merely it'southward been improved considerably since last year. Information technology did forestall us from switching the drive to a new system in spite of following instructions for doing so. NVELO tells us that that Crucial should be able to reset the license key in seconds, but I judge y'all have to become onto the right people for that, as nosotros had to wait quite a few days.

NVELO as well says that there are no criterion optimizations going on. Rather because CrystalDiskMark is just measuring input/output functioning the 64GB enshroud is able to take intendance of it entirely in-house leaving the hard drive out of the equation. They say it is the aforementioned scenario when looking at other benchmark programs such as IOMeter. Therefore we feel readers should ignore those results and focus on our File Copy Exam and Existent-Earth Applications pages. Honestly I would have been happy to leave out the constructed benchmarks, just I anticipated many of you wanted to see them so there you have them.

Licensing issues aside, the NVELO Dataplex software does an splendid task of enhancing system performance without you knowing information technology's even there. The Crucial Adrenaline is SSD enshroud done well and for that information technology gets our recommendation.

Pros: Caching works well, improves performance in many scenarios. Price is adequate for what you are getting. Can be used as a drop-in upgrade.

Cons: Software licensing should be less intrusive. A pocket-sized SSD remains faster at the aforementioned price.