Test Setup

• After initial configuration and installation we created a disk image that will be used to test every drive.
• Automated updates were disabled for all programs. This ensures that for every review each drive will get the same starting point without possible pollution from previous testing.
• Our disk image consumes around 25 GB on disk, we resized the partition to fill all available space on the drive.
• Partitions were checked to be aligned.
• In order to minimize random variation, each of the performance tests is run ten times, with reboots in between tests to minimize the impact of disk cache.
• We used the average of the ten runs as final score.
• All application benchmarks run the actual application and do not replay any disk traces.

We used a Western Digital Caviar Blue 500 GB SATA 6 Gbps (WD5000AAKX) for our testing.

First we ran the HDD alone, without the Synapse SSD present in the system. This will serve as our "WD Caviar Blue 500 GB" baseline value.

Once that phase of testing was completed, we installed the OCZ Synapse drive, configured the Dataplex software and gave the system a few benchmark runs to warm up caches, reflecting a typical user's system setup.

Dataplex Software

The software that makes the caching magic happen is not manufactured by OCZ, but by NVELO, which license their product to OCZ.

The license key for the Dataplex software is printed on the SSD drive itself and on the included documentation.

Software installation requires that you download the software from NVELO and enter the license key which will be activated online and linked to your system. In order to free up the license key when you reinstall your system, you have to uninstall the software via Windows Control Panel. Should your system break down, you can contact OCZ to get a new license key.


During Dataplex software installation you are asked to select the linked drives for caching.
At this time only the boot HDD can be selected for caching, which means that users with multiple HDDs will not be able to cache all their drives - only the Windows startup drive.

Once that step is complete, the system will be rebooted and the caching layer is active. Caching happens transparently at the lowest OS level: the Synapse SSD will disappear from Windows and all its capacity will be used for caching. There are no further tweakable parameters available in the Dataplex software.

A useful addition to the software, for example, would be a feature that lets you "pin" certain programs and folders to the SSD, so that they are always cached - no matter what.