 Welcome to an unboxing of an SSD that might seem confusing on the surface but is actually, well a little bit confusing but very very cool. This is the impossible to open, okay hold on, this is the OCZ Synapse Cache SSD. So this is not intended at all to be used to install an operating system or any software directly on this drive, you're not supposed to do that. What you're supposed to do with this 64 gig drive is you are supposed to use it as a cache for your hard drive. And so you go, oh okay, yeah yeah, Intel SRT, I've heard of that before and I say no, not Intel SRT. This SSD is not intended for use with Intel SRT, it is actually intended for use with OCZ's Dataplex software. So what Dataplex does is it, well okay, it's very similar to how Intel SRT functions in that it allows your OS to manage the caching of data through an SSD rather than just writing and reading everything directly to and from the hard drive. So why would you use Dataplex is the question because you could just buy a Zend68 motherboard and then you could run SRT. What if you don't have a Zend68 motherboard? What if you want to have an X79 platform which, by the way, even though it's the higher end Intel chipset, does not support SRT? Well then you're starting to look into a different solution, so something like Dataplex. So why this SSD? What's special about this SSD? And I'll tell you guys now, the only thing that's special about this SSD is the durability. So what OCZ has done is they've taken an SSD that is actually a 128 gig SSD and they've gone and they've put 64 gigs, wait no, hold on, how does it work? No! Right. They've taken a 64 gig SSD, that's what's actually here in the package, and then they have over-provisioned half of the capacity of this drive for wear leveling. So what that means is it appears to your operating system as a 32 gig drive if you ever actually plug it in directly, which you should never do because it's a cache SSD, but the reason for that is that because of the limited write cycles on these SSDs, OCZ has gone, okay, well let's take half of the capacity and let's squirl it away so that because this is going to be used with a hard drive and it's going to have things caching in and out of it all the time, we're going to make sure that it's got half of that capacity stored away so that even if we have to write to it and write to it and write to it constantly, we are going to keep the drive safe and keep it functioning for a much longer period of time. So this is a San Force based SATA 3 drive, but it uses a special firmware to hide half of the capacity and then it comes with a license, so I'm just going to cover up the license key but it's on there, believe me, it comes with a license for the OCZ Dataplex software which installs on Windows 7. So let me just see if there's anything else that I'm missing here. Right, so what else is included? We've got one of those 2.5 inch to 3.5 inch adapters here, we've got some mounting screws if you wanted to put this in, oh, OCZ, OCZ, if you wanted to put it in a notebook you could use these mounting screws but you're probably, oh no, okay, I guess you could use them to mount this to that, okay. No, no you couldn't. Okay, well, this is not for a notebook, this is more for a desktop, you've got a little sticker here and you've got, oh, there's the Dataplex license key, I'll make sure I use that before I post this unboxing. So you're also going to want to make sure that you stay tuned on my NCIXcom channel because what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this drive, I'm going to run it with Intel SRT on a WD Black 2TB hard drive as the boot drive, then I'm going to run it not using SRT, I'm going to use the Dataplex software which by the way is, supposedly, I haven't tried it yet, much easier to install and set up than Intel SRT and we're going to see which of those two caching solutions learns faster and allows your system to perform better. So I'm very excited about that and thank you for checking out my unboxing of the Synapse Cache Drive from OCZ. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews and other computer videos.