Maximum PC

I got the new issue yesterday, and was very intrigued by a new ad from Corsair on their new Accelerator Cache drive. It is supposed to supplement your hard drive and really speed up your system. I could not find any for sale yet, but I was wondering if the hype was really justified.

I saw their marketing material, but... I'd wait on someone to do the actual benchmarks. It looks promising, if it does what Corsair claims it can do.

I am hoping the folks at Maximum PC will do a comparison - there are others from OCZ and Crucial.

It's a cache drive, pure and simple; and is basically a shitty SSD they want to get off their shelves.

A cache drive will allow a spindle drive to do repetitive stuff quicker by adding a small SSD underneath it. That SSD will be useless and is basically a RAM Drive. It's still slow as shit until you do the same actions over and over and it "learns" that you need this data the SSD is holding.

In geek speak: you're being suckered. Buy a good SSD for blazing speed as C: and use a spindle drive for D: storage. They're preaching the "best" of both worlds, but isn't. Pay $25 more for a good Synched SSD and get over the capacity hump.

Do, or do not...there is no "try". $90 gets you a freaking fast 60G SSD. Let all those videos and documents sit on a spindle for playback.

Yeah, I agree with Chumly. Its Corsair's own version of Intel's SRT function for people who do not have the Z68 or X79 chipset. But even then, you would be much better off saving money up for a proper sized SSD in the 120GB+ range once they hit the cheaper price/GB ratio. Even now, you can get OCZ 120gb sync NAND Vertex 3's for $150AR. And they will only continue to get cheaper, specially when they make smaller NAND's in much larger quantities.

I'm suspect about using smaller NAND sizes. They have lower PE cycles.

Don't get me wrong though. I have an SSD and love the damn thing, but I feel that Flash Memory is the only thing that can't really be improved by Moore's Law other than capacity.