SSD advice

Calibos

Hopefully someone can help me out here.

Thanks to the bargain alerts forum I was clued on a great deal from amazon.de for the Arctic Mc001N barebones net-top PC for €99 down from a high of about 250 in November. The price has apparently been up and down over the last year but the lowest its been before now was €140. I know its been out a while now and theres faster nettops out there but its fast enough for my purposes and I simply don't want to be spending 250-350 for performance I don't need especially when I need to buy 4 of them for around the house. €99 + a few extras is a bargain IMHO.

Its an Atom dual core 525 with a mobility Radeon 5340. Barebones for €99 suits me fine because I will only be using them to run the Openelec version of XBMC. I ordered 4 of them like I said. Anyway. I just need to add memory and storage. 4x 4gb 1333mhz 204pin DDR3 modules will be ordered at €22 each. I was going to boot openelec off 16gb USB thumbdrives but discovered that despite Openelec itself having a tiny footprint, one can easily start filling the other 15.8 gigs with all the locally cached media artwork etc. Amazon only had 3 of the sticks I wanted left in stock. So then I looked at the 32gb versions and realised we might be getting close to the price of low end SSD prices and the transfer rates look much better on SSD. One also wouldn't have a big USB3 Thumbdrive plugged into the front USB3 ports on the device just asking to be knocked against.

So I found these on amazon - SanDisk ReadyCache™ SSD 32gb Sata3 for about €38 euro each.

So in fact it might have been fortuitous that amazon didn't have 4 of the 216gb thumbdrives in stock because it made me keep looking.

So my question after all that probably superfluous information is whether there is something special about the firmware of these sandisk 32gb SSD that mean they can only be used in a readycache/boost configuration in conjunction with a normal HDD or whether they are exactly like every other SSD, its just at 32gb the only market for such a small capacity SSD is the Readyboost market and thus they are named/marketed as such.

Remember for my usage in the MC001N, I wouldn't be using it in conjunction with a HDD in a readyboost config, it would be the only storage. (Which is fine because for my purposes it only needs to hold OPenelec @ 200mb and to cache my media thumbnail artwork etc which for Terabytes of content on my Nas would be a lot)

In short, can this particular SSD be used as standalone storage or can it only be used in a readyboost config with a HDD??

Thanks in advance.

Calibos

Oh dear, just came across something in the reviews. Looks like the thing wont work with software and a password and a reviewer saus can only be used as a cache not data?? The search for a cheap 32gb Sata SSD continues

Skill Magill

Format it, then use as standalone storage