Question 1

Would this work as a laptop ssd ? and if not were could i find one?

Accepted Answer

Sebastian m,

I believe it would.  I'm no expert here but I seem to recall in my Dell M6400 there was a custom electrical interface which connected to the drive to facilitate plugging into the main board without cables.  I did not use this drive in my laptop and the last drive I installed in it was a three years ago.

The first thing I would check is the drive interface spec for the laptop.  Your options appear to be IDE (unlikely), SATA (very likely) or SAS (newer and faster, and, it seems, mechanically identical (??)).  This drive is a SATA drive and in my application was a plug-in replacement for a rotating SATA hard drive.

That said, I would not rely exclusively on my word as this really isn't an area in which I am expert.

Question 2

Can this be used in a laptop? Also can it have an operating system installed?

Accepted Answer

In a laptop? Yes - if you have somewhere to put it. Laptops usually only have room for one disk. If you intend to make this the primary disk for a laptop you can install it (it has standard mounting holes and STA connectors) but at 32GB it's not going to do much for you after the OS is installed. The system BIOS views this as just another disk so you COULD install an OS (if it were small enough). The magic of caching is in the software utility that is installed separately. If you want to rebuild your laptop with an SSD then buy a bigger one - 128GB or up. Prices are coming down all the time.

Question 3

I am aware this product says for Windows 7 & 8 - however, I am wondering if I could use this as a boot drive for a Linux program.  I would like to be able to do so without running windows as a paralell os through VirtualBox or anything similar.  Any info or suggestions ? ? ?

Accepted Answer

I have a Linux box that I use for a headless server.  The storage is a RAID 5 array, and this SSD is the boot and OS drive (the whole drive is my / (root) partition, and the RAID is my /home and swap partitions.)  It works great at a boot drive and, because mine is a server and I don't need a ton of applications installed, it works fine having everything except /home on it. (Maybe consider moving /var).

To save write cycles, I place my /tmp in RAM.  In /etc/fstab:
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs nodev,nosuid,noexec,mode=1777 0 0

To optimize SSD performance, I mount / with these flags:
UUID=  / ext4 defaults,noatime,discard 1 1

Question 4

Has anyone used this as an add-on to a system already using a SSD as its boot drive? I don't really need it because my Samsung 840 Pro 256gb SSD using Rapid Mode is blistering fast but for 30 bucks for this readycache drive, I am curious. Thanks

Accepted Answer

its a 32 gb ssd...thats about the extent of its usefulness in my opinion. Personally I find the ap associated with it redundant. I simply formatted it and added it as a ready-cache drive in windows. Physically its fine as a ssd goes.

Question 5

Can this be used as a standalone drive? I planned on installing windows 8.1 on it and using for browsing, email, that kind of stuff.

Accepted Answer

It can be...just don't use the software that comes with it. But it's small. I don't believe there's enough space for 8.1. Can't remember 8.1's exact full install space.

Question 6

Im swaping out some parts in my computer to give it an upgrade and i wanted to have windows 8 on an SSD and everything else on an HDD does anyone know if this particular SSD is RAID compatible???

Accepted Answer

For raid, optimally, you need identical drives for all drives in a particular raid array. I would suggest installing each drive type to their own array. If you need a single volume for all, then spanning the resulting volumes(disk concatenation) would do the trick. If you do this, I highly suggest you schedule regular updates to another volume detatched from the spanned volume. If the raid type you chose for your arrays was 0, the setup I describe here would fail if any single drive in the spanned volume fails.

Question 7

can this be used as a virtual memory drive? I am using windows 7 pro and have 8GB memory, want to designate this drive as the memory virtual drive, set min/max to 32GB, will this work? Thanks

Accepted Answer

I would not recommend using a SSD for a virtual memory drive, they have a finite amount of writes and would not last very long under those conditions. That is what I've seen each time I come across that topic.

Question 8

Does this work with Windows 10?

Accepted Answer

The specifications only promise compatibility with Windows 7 and 8. To be certain i suggest you go to Sandisk's website and send an email to their tech support to ask about Windows 10 compatibility. In general, Windows 10 architecture is similar to Windows 8 so one can guess that it will work OK with ReadyCache. After all, ReadyCache is intended to be transparent to the operating system which means Windows is "seeing" and working with your main hard drive while the ReadyCache operates unobtrusively to speed things up. But, i would still contact Sandisk directly and ask them.

Question 9

Will this SSD fit and be able tooperate inside an Asus laptop model x551c notebook pc?

Accepted Answer

It would fit but it's not designed for use as an OS drive.  It's only supposed to be used as a cache for a hard drive to store frequently accessed data.  For a laptop drive you need an SSD of around 128GB to 240GB.

Question 10

Is there a way to bypass the caching functionality of the device and use it as a normal drive?

Accepted Answer

There is but for the price I would say save up a little bit more and get a 120gb or 256gb it larger and much faster

Questions & Answers