There is almost nothing about the SanDisk
ReadyCache that followed our preconceptions. The drive looks like a regular
2.5" SSD, but it's peculiarly light at 30g thanks to its use of a plastic
casing. The other curiosity about the casing is that it doesn't use any screws
to hold it together but instead it uses a hook mechanism in the centre of the
casing that locks the cover in place.
SanDisk
ReadyCache 32GB
The drive bay adapter is also very
lightweight, because it's nothing more than a folded piece of bare aluminium
sheet. It makes you wonder why other manufacturers bother with mild steel that
requires some form of protective coating.
With the cover removed, you can see that
the PCB is absolutely tiny and only has four flash chips arranged over both
sides of the board along with a SanDisk controller chip.
SanDisk has kept the design incredibly
small by limiting the capacity of ReadyCache to 32GB and hasn't bothered about
offering any options to its customers. If you want a ReadyCache it will be 32GB
and that's the end of the matter.
SanDisk
has kept the design incredibly small by limiting the capacity of ReadyCache to
32GB and hasn't bothered about offering any options to its customers.
The other oddity is the controller chip,
which is the SanDisk 20-82-00270-1, and while it's difficult to be sure that a
chip hasn't simply been rebadged, in this case we're fairly sure this
controller has previously been used in USB 3.0 flash drives.
We had a scout around the SanDisk website
for firmware updates and didn't find anything listed. While we found release
notes for v1.0.1, we couldn't find the actual software, so we gave that up as a
bad job and got on with testing the ReadyCache drive.
The only other task is to install the
Condusiv ExpressCache software. The name Condusiv wasn't a familiar one to us,
but it turns out that Condusiv was formerly known as Diskeeper and is a company
that has a long history of writing software for managing hard drives and still
uses the Diskeeper brand for some of its products.
SanDisk
has the decency to print the activation code for the ExpressCache software on
the instruction leaflet that comes in the package, and that makes life easier
SanDisk has the decency to print the
activation code for the ExpressCache software on the instruction leaflet that
comes in the package, and that makes life easier. The software is a hefty 131MB
download, but the download was very quick.
Once the ExpressCache software was
installed it took control of the caching process and simply reported how much
of the drive has been used and how much space remained, using a simple bar
chart. There is nothing else for the customer to do apart from using their new,
faster PC.
Well, of course, you need to use it for a
while, so the software can start caching files, in particular Windows 7 files
and your main applications such as email and browsers.
The
SanDisk is very fast at sequential read and write tests and also at 512K read
tests.
The performance figures deserve some
scrutiny as the claimed read figure of 480MB/s is considerably higher than the
115MB/s write speed, in much the same way that the Crucial Adrenaline has been
configured.
The SanDisk is very fast at sequential read
and write tests and also at 512K read tests. 512K write tests suffer and 4K
tests look rather slow compared to the other SSD drives.
In practice, the ReadyCache does a fine job
and its performance was very satisfactory, delivering impressive results for
less than $64.
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Details
·
Price: $61
·
Manufacturer: SanDisk
·
Website: www.sandisk.com
·
Required spec: Windows 7
Ratings
·
Quality: 7
·
Value: 8
·
Overall: 8
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