Last twelvemonth we reviewed OCZ's RevoDrive Hybrid, which saw the marriage of a 1TB hard drive and a pair of 50GB SandForce SSDs on a PCI Express card. The idea was to use the SSD controllers and 100GB of NAND wink as a high-speed cache for the much larger spinning disk bulldoze.

Potentially achieving operation close to that of a SandForce SF-2281 SSD with a 1TB storage capacity was very appealing, still there were some notable drawbacks. At $485 (since dropped to $330), the RevoDrive sounds like reasonable value at $0.48 per gigabyte (in SSD terms), but in reality the RevoDrive Hybrid performed nothing like a high-finish SSD in most tests. As a result, we had a hard fourth dimension recommending OCZ's hybrid solution.

Then on January, Crucial appear their latest SSD series called Adrenaline. Not meant to replace their existing and well regarded m4 SSDs, the Adrenaline is a cache solution meant to work along your existing disk bulldoze, using a 50GB SSD to act as solid land wink-based cache for your larger main hard drive.

OCZ also offers a similar caching solution called Synapse, which comes in 64GB and 128GB capacities. Though after our review of the RevoDrive Hybrid, OCZ didn't seem and so keen for united states of america to take another pass.

Substantially what we have is Crucial's respond to the OCZ Synapse. The Adrenaline costs $110 for the 50GB version, while the slightly larger Synapse costs $135. Note that Crucial'south drive allocates 50GB for caching while 14GB is provisioned for operation optimization, so really both drives feature 64GB of NAND flash memory.

Similar the Synapse, and of form, the RevoDrive Hybrid the new Adrenaline uses the Dataplex software. Although nosotros had found licensing bug to be a headache earlier nosotros likewise acknowledged that the software does work rather well. With that said, let'southward move on to cheque out the Adrenaline in better detail...

Adrenaline in Particular

The Crucial Adrenaline looks like a typical SSD and that's because it is. The bulldoze is based on the m4 pattern featuring the same controller and NAND flash retention.

Crucial claims the Adrenaline tin achieve read speeds of up to 500MB/s and write throughput of 95MB/s, the same figures they claim for the 64GB version of the m4. Of form, ultimately those speeds will exist determined past how well the caching software works.

The Marvell 88SS9174 controller forth with a large 256MB cache are used to ameliorate modest write operation and eliminate any 'stuttering' issues. The Adrenaline is equipped with 8x8GB 25nm chips (29F64G08CFACB) and feature Micron's high-speed ONFI ii.1 NAND interface for 166 MT/due south with 512-byte industry standard sector size.

Like all SSDs, the Adrenaline cites very depression power consumption figures, at idle information technology uses less than 100mW and when active consumes just 150mW. It measures 100.5 ten 69.85 10 9.50mm and weighs 75 grams. The drive is uniform with both laptops and desktops. Crucial supplies a 3.5" adapter in case your chassis doesn't have a 2.v" bay.