CENATEK Rocket Drive SSD - Unpacking and Installing

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Out of the Box
Here are a few close-up shots of the unit out of the box.

 

You'll see the 4 sticks of 256MB each populating the memory slots on the Rocket Raid card. Quite unique looking. Here are a few more close-up shots.

 

 

Above you can see the ram slots each individually labeled and populated with standard PC133 7.5ns SDRAM memory. Also a shot of the board showing the assembly code and Revision A.

Lets take a closer look at the memory itself and the chipset of the card.

 

   

 

Ok, now that we are thoroughly familiar with the aesthetics of the card, lets cover the installation aspects of the Rocket Drive.

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Installation
Installation of the card was very straight forward. I did not encounter any problems at all and the process is very smooth. Almost "too smooth". Nevertheless, the drive installed flawlessly and this is a welcome refresh where some products of this nature can be a real hassle. Here is a few shots of the card fully installed. Notice it takes up only a slight bit of extra PCI area due to the slanted memory slots. Nothing to worry about however if you plan on keeping your PCI slots full of add-on cards. I didn't have to, but in this case, I moved the SB Audigy card down a slot to give the Rocket Drive a bit of breathing room.

 

 

Now lets boot up into windows and begin the software installation process.
 

Immediately after booting into windows I was greeted with the standard MS "Found New Hardware Wizard". Pointing the wizard to the A: drive, I simply needed to tell it which OS to look for. In this case, WindowsXP Professional.

 

Once you have the Rocket Raid card installed, you'll still need to proceed with the included instructions so that it becomes usable by your system. The instructions were accurate and easy to read and once the process is completed, you'll be set and ready to use the drive in any way you choose.

After completing the install, you'll want to goto the computer management system found in the control panel under Administrative Tools. Then goto the Disk Management section, and hopefully, you'll be greeted with the screen below.

 

Once there, you will need to assign the Rocket Drive a drive letter and format it. Initially I formatted using XP's native NTFS but after having a few troubles running programs, I switched it over to FAT32 and have seen no problems at all.

 

   

 

After formatting, the wizard will complete itself and let you know exactly what it has done. Then you can go back to the Disk Management section to see your new found hardware properly displayed.

 

   

 

Above in the last shot, notice I right clicked on the Rocket Drive in order to "Make the partition active". Once that is done, your all set.

Finally, as with any HD, the best thing you should do before installing hardware on it (if possible) is run a quick defrag. Obviously with this drive being only 1GB and solid state, I was prepared for a very fast defrag, however, a better word to use would be INSTANTANEOUS. Yep, as quickly as I clicked the defrag button, it was done. WOW! Of course a truer test would be to install several programs onto the Rocket Drive, let them run for a few weeks, THEN defrag it. I did this, and with time, the drive does become bogged down a bit with programs, installs, deletions etc. Still, no defrag ever took more than 5 seconds to complete, no matter how much clutter I had on the drive.
 

On to the fun part. Benchmarks anyone?

Next: Benchmarks >>
 

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