Solid state drives, despite having coming down in prices, are still beyond the reach of the average consumer, especially when the price per gigabyte ratio is considered.

For roughly AED 400 you can either get a 1TB (or more, depending on brand) hard drive, compared to a 120GB (or lower, depending on brand) solid state drive. So either you invest heavily in an SSD and only have Windows and a few other daily use software on it, or stick to the tried and tested mechanical hard drives.

Hybrid Systems

Thankfully there are a few manufacturers out there who provide a solution that’s in-between. Sure, Seagate has their Momentus XT hybrid drives, and Western Digital is also coming up with their own solution early next year. However, even that is a solution limited by capacity.

And so SanDisk brings a solution that’s more practical for people who don’t want to disrupt their existing setups, nor pay a hefty price for the accompanying speed bump. The SanDisk ReadyCache 32GB SSD is basically a drive that’s designed to bring an ultra-fast caching solution for your current mechanical hard drives.

The proposition is simple: you plug in the SanDisk ReadyCache 32GB SSD into your PC, download the software which sets up your drives’ data to be cached on the SSD. After some time (hours to days) the SSD software recognizes your frequently used programs and their data is cached onto the SSD for instant use whenever you next launch your software of choice.

Setup

So let’s break it down a little, stating with the installation. The SanDisk ReadyCache 32GB SSD comes with an instructional manual, a SATA III (6Gbps) data cable, a 3.5-inch bracket with screws and the SSD itself. Given the extremely low profile of just 7mm, the SanDisk ReadyCache 32GB SSD can even be used in slim laptops (that have capacity for two drives).

Once installed, the drive immediately shows up on Windows 7. At this point you have to go and download the ExpressCache software which allows an extremely easy on-click solution to activate the caching on the SanDisk ReadyCache 32GB SSD and selecting which drives you want to cache.

The ExpressCache software even shows the amount of storage been used on the drive for cache. Furthermore there’s even a real-time graph showing how much of the cached data is being used at the moment.

And just in case you want to change your usage habits (brought about by installation of big games or programs) then you can simply click a button to clear out the entire cache on the drive and it’ll start from scratch. Don’t worry about losing any of the cached data as all of it is written onto the actual hard drives as well for backup automatically.