NVELO Dataplex SSD Caching Software Review – Seven mSATA SSDs Prove An Amazing Concept
Sunday, December 4, 2011
One of the largest voids consumers have spoken of in storage technology has been the inability to combine our new found speed of SSDs with the capacity of the hard drive.
Our latest review of the Toshiba Portege Z830 Ultrabook reached new heights with SSD speeds of 550MB/s now possible in laptops as light as 2.4lbs and just over 1/2″ thick but this still leaves a question of capacity.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have the speed of the SSD combined with the capacity of a hard drive in a notebook solution without breaking the bank? Well, it is not a possibility with our Z830 but for the Lenovo X220 and any other notebook with mSATA and HDD storage combined, this may not be such a far reach.
Lets take this one step further. Today’s review will not be your typical quick one off of what most likely will be a reality in the near future, but rather, an initial break in of our Lenovo X220 laptop in testing NVELO Dataplex with every mSATA that we could muster up. We think this will probably be the leading collection of mSATA SSDs on the web today with manufacturers such as Intel, Samsung, Toshiba, Kingston, AData, Runcore and Renice all taking part.
THE EVOLUTION OF NVELO AND DATAPLEX
NVELO was formed in 2010 when Cadence Design Systems acquired Denali Software and a few Denali employees saw the viability of a new design in caching software as a great solution in today’s storage environment. NVELO subsequently became its own entity and is now in the business of marketing Dataplex, a storage caching software that just makes too much sense to believe it is anything less than a breakthrough.
DATAPLEX CACHING SOFTWARE
Dataplex simply uses a SSD to create a ‘high performance’ cache for your hard drive. This cache can be used from an SSD as small as 32GB and gives your hard drive very close performance to that of your SSD. OCZ was the first to support NVELO and our recent reviews of both the RevoDrive 3 Hybrid PCIe SSD and the Synapse Cache SSD show that this software is going to open some eyes.
HOW DATAPLEX WORKS
Dataplex manages the entire hard drive and caches the ‘hot’ data while leaving the ‘cold’ data on the hard drive. The software actually learns and remembers which applications and data are used most and retains that information on the SSD. A great example of this occurs during system start up.
The typical computer might start at over a minute with a hard drive alone, whereas it starts in 15 seconds with an SSD. With Dataplex, it not only starts the cached hard drive at the time of the SSD, but also, you can turn your system off and come back tomorrow for that 15 second start up once again. Dataplex remembers and retains the files that are used most.