Question 1

How does this drive prevent you from having to reinstall your OS? One review mentions this and it's quite confusing. Does this drive automatically clone your operating system non-stop? Does it save specific OS settings, etc? Or something entirely different.

Hope someone can clarify on that review, and whether the claim is true or not.

Accepted Answer

The Cache drive is installed in the computer alongside the hard drive that your OS is on.  After you install the cache drive in your computer, there's a product key and instructions to download Dataplex, the program that manages the cache drive through your OS.  The program will ask you which drive has your OS on it, and which is the cache drive, and then that's it.

The cache drive will then become inaccessable to you inside the OS, because it has been completely allocated to for use as extra hard drive cache.  All hard drives come with a small amount of memory installed so it can access programs more quickly than just searching for them on the disk.  The SSD Cache drive expands the hard drive's capability to do that by quite a lot!  Because of that, your hard drive will seem like it is reading/writing like an actual SSD.

It really does make a difference, especially since a lot of people need terabytes of storage these days, but can't afford an SSD that large.  Just note that you may not notice a difference until you've had about three normal uses of your computer, as the cache drive learns your programs and stuff.  I'm pretty sure my rig starts and runs much faster with this setup that when I had just an SSD.

If it makes you feel better I bought this thinking it was a regular SSD, and was about to return it until I found out how it worked.  They really need to put this information in the product description.  Corsair also makes Cache SSDs, if you're shopping around.

Question 2

Does this need a specific driver to read all 128 gb?  I tried using this as my primary win7 OS drive and it is only ready 64gb.

Accepted Answer

The Synapse is a special SSD used for caching a hard drive.  It is not meant to be used as a regular SSD drive.  According to the Synapse FAQ at OCZ, only half the drive is visible at any time.  Since caching tends to write the SSD more often, OCZ chose to reserve the other half as space for replacing worn out NAND in order to increase the SSD's life.

Once the caching software is installed for the Synapse, the SSD becomes invisible.  However, it is there, caching the hard drive that is assigned to it.  Eventually, commonly accessed files on that hard drive will be cached and load at SSD speeds.

Instead of using your Synapse as a boot drive, I recommend adding a boot hard drive of your choice.  Then use the Dataplex software to assign the Synapse to cache your boot hard drive.  After several boots, the performance will be very close to a regular SSD, but you will have more, cheaper storage space with the hard drive.  I've been using my Synapse for a few weeks, and the boot drive performance has become very fast for boot and commonly used software.

Question 3

Does this need AHCI in the BIOS to work?

Accepted Answer

Don't know your answer.  Do know that this only works with win 7 and a hard drive.  It makes your hard drive into a hybrid drive.  Reason so cheap people by them think that they are SSD which they are but will only work with another drive. Once people figured this out they returned them in droves so they got lots of them and selling them cheap.
 Here is some info from ocz/consumer/synapse-sata-3-ssd "newegg won let me put in the link but go to OCZ and search synapse
I gave mine away to a friend.

Mike

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