Conclusion

The Crucial Adrenaline completely lives up to what Crucial has said about it, in my testing it boosted random access times on a HDD by ten times and Windows booted in under half the time it would have taken without the SSD cache.

Installation was painless for the most part; it doesn’t work if you have multiple operating systems installed but other than that it was as easy as connecting the drive and running the installer.

Crucial sells the Adrenaline as a 50GB drive but in actual fact it’s basically just a 64GB M4 with different stickers and some software included.

This means that if you decide to use the Adrenaline as an SSD it’ll work just fine for that too.

There are a couple of these SSD cache systems on the market now and the Crucial is one of the cheapest and easy to setup systems. Crucial are also one of the most reliable drive makers around which is a real bonus.

At £76 the Crucial Adrenaline is a good deal as £67 for a 64GB M4 plus the cost of caching software which could easily £20.

Pros

• Huge increases in performance compared to a HDD
• Increases the speed of an older SSD
• Very easy to install
• Crucial reliability
• Good pricing
• Can still be used as a normal 64GB SSD

Cons

• Dual booting can be more difficult than normal to setup
• Stickers appear to be the wrong way around