Giveaway: Speed up your storage with FuzeDrive

Enmotus, the company behind FuzeDrive, has given us five licenses for the newest update to their software which includes compatibility with Intel and instead of writing another review we’ve decided to spread the wealth. Five members of Overclockers.com will be chosen randomly and given the opportunity to test the FuzeDrive software on their own systems. We just ask that you report back in the comments with your experiences and performance gains you have seen. Before and after screenshots would be appreciated.

So, the big question…

What is FuzeDrive?

FuzeDrive has been around for a couple of years now and originally was only available for AMD, namely the Ryzen and Threadripper platforms. With the second generation of AMD Ryzen and the X470 chipset release, Enmotus and AMD got together and offered a variation of FuzeDrive named StoreMi to 400 chipset users for free. This free software had some limitations with drive sizes and RAM caching, but other than that had full functionality. Enmotus has since updated their software and it is now compatible with the sixth generation and up Intel platforms.

What FuzeDrive does is blend your fast storage and typically slower, capacity storage into one virtual tiered “C:” drive. It continually migrates your active data to the faster storage making it more readily available to the system. Many compare this technology to “caching” and while it is similar it also has its differences. Caching is only temporary and the data is flushed when not in use to make room for more recent data. FuzeDrive, on the other hand, prioritizes your data and tailors the drive to your habits leaving the most commonly used data on the faster storage tier and moving less frequently accessed data to the storage tier only when additional fast storage is needed.

Real-World StoreMI Performance

In our recent coverage of the Ryzen R7 2700, StoreMi was also covered fairly extensively, which one can take a deep dive into StoreMI technology there. In the review, a 256 GB SATA M.2 drive was merged with a 2 TB 5400 RPM HDD that had the operating system installed on it. The difference before and after using the StoreMi software was surprising – everything just ran faster as if the OS was installed on the SSD. Here’s a quote from that review:

This was where it got fun, using a stopwatch we compared boot times before and after using StoreMI. Starting right from power-on to Windows 10 desktop it took 56 seconds to boot directly from the HDD. After setting up the StoreMI tiered drive the boot time dropped a full 30 seconds to 26s, that’s right less than half the time to get to the desktop and the fun doesn’t stop there.

Here’s a video published by Enmotus demonstrating performance before and after using FuzeDrive called Boot to Shoot:

As you can see the FuzeDrive software really does work. It can speed up your operating system or a storage drive to near SSD or better speeds depending on the media you use. Even if you have a large SSD currently but always wanted to upgrade to a PCIe based M.2 drive and the cost of a large capacity drive was prohibitive or you didn’t really want to re-install Windows. Just plug the M.2 drive into the system and run the FuzeDrive software after, a reboot you’re ready to rock seeing the advantages of the M.2 drive without the hassles of messing with operating system installation and downloads of all your software.

FuzeDrive works with any storage media such as HDD, SSD, and SATA or PCIe M.2 drives. There are two versions of the software available, FuzeDrive Standard and FuzeDrive Plus, see the table below for details.

Both versions of the FuzeDrive software are available for purchase on the Enmotus website, there is also a FuzeDrive FAQ.

How to Win a Copy of FuzeDrive

We have five software activations available for qualifying members. To qualify, you need to be a member of the Overclockers.com Forums community for 30 days or more and possess the appropriate hardware to properly use/test the FuzeDrive software. The hardware required is an Intel CPU using the Z170 chipset or better with a Hard Drive as the primary/OS drive or as storage (will speed up both). The winners will be chosen randomly from all qualifying entries on September 1, 2018. We also ask that you share your experience here in the comments with before and after testing if you need some guidance don’t be afraid to ask or use our recent Ryzen with StoreMI review as a guide. We already know what the software is capable of and would really like your feedback.

Good Luck!

Shawn Jennings – Johan45