SilverStone HDDBOOST Review

[Apoptosis]

SilverStone HDDBOOST Review

The SilverStone HDDBOOST gives any hard drive the boot times of a SSD without sacrificing hard drive capacity, write wear on the SSD or the complications of having to change file paths when you would run programs off a secondary hard drive. The HDDBOOST is a great improvement over any mechanical drive and offers limitless options for drive combinations, all for just $49.99!



Article Title: SilverStone HDDBOOST Review
Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1361/1/
Pricing At Time of Print: $44.99 after a $5 rebate

[Sttm]

It is definitely an interesting piece of hardware. Though I do not know if Id actually want to use it. It did not seem like it really did much for the system besides boot time; which could also be had by just reinstalling the OS on the SSD to begin with.

I wish the article was a bit more clear at the start as to details of the device. At first glance, because of the lack of mention of it requiring an SSD drive, I thought it would do what the Momentus XT does and cache heavily used data onto a flash chip, but allow you to use any HD to do it. So you could take a 2TB drive, toss on the 4gb flash chip and get the performance boost. Which really sounds like something someone should be making come to think of it.


Lastly, does anyone think that boot times matter this much? I see products like this, and MS and the Linux guys constantly trying to improve boot times, and using the boot time to criticize other company's work. I was reading this Linux sham article by PC World the other day and they were praising Ubuntu's boot time more then it being free. I only boot my tower once a day, and if it takes 15s or 30s, I dont really care; but it seems everyone is making a big deal out of it.

[Kaos Kid]

This could really come in handy for those that use WinXP. I know that every time I have to do a reinstall (even from the official msdn XPProSP3 cd) I have hours of updating to do to bring it up to todays date. It would be nice to not have to do a reinstall. Plus with all the stuff I like to load at bootup it takes about 2 minutes when I include my wi-fi adapter establishing a connection as well.

Question: If you decide to replace hard drives can you "ghost" the existing OS installation on the HDDBOOST SSD back to the larger HDD that you swapped in? That would make it painless indeed if you have HDD corruption to at least get your OS back up and usable as quickly as possible, then you can hookup that faulty drive to another connection in your box and use a data recovery app like GetDataBackFast to try to salvage your data. I could use that kind of functionality.

Thanks for the review Austin, I'm going to be keeping an eye on this once it hits the shelves. Well done!

[skier]

This could really come in handy for those that use WinXP. I know that every time I have to do a reinstall (even from the official msdn XPProSP3 cd) I have hours of updating to do to bring it up to todays date. It would be nice to not have to do a reinstall. Plus with all the stuff I like to load at bootup it takes about 2 minutes when I include my wi-fi adapter establishing a connection as well.

Question: If you decide to replace hard drives can you "ghost" the existing OS installation on the HDDBOOST SSD back to the larger HDD that you swapped in? That would make it painless indeed if you have HDD corruption to at least get your OS back up and usable as quickly as possible, then you can hookup that faulty drive to another connection in your box and use a data recovery app like GetDataBackFast to try to salvage your data. I could use that kind of functionality.

Thanks for the review Austin, I'm going to be keeping an eye on this once it hits the shelves. Well done!

i'm not sure about the ghosting your talking about, i'm pretty sure there has to be a working copy on the HDD, but i can try it with a stripped install of XP with a couple drives i have (in the middle of installing win7 on two or three drives, and XP on the kingston as a notebook drive, still have to move ~240GB of files from a 250GB barracuda to my momentus which i just installed 7 on after destroying the old installation) i'll do it asap though as i'll be glued to this monitor for a few hours

Thanks, and it is currently available at newegg! even has an open box one for $34.99!

@sttm it has its uses, I know it sure simplifies upgrading because not everyone has the time to reinstall an OS with dozens of GB of applications and updates or some that dont have a spare HDD to put files on while they install (i know i hate losing all my history/bookmarks/saved passwords too which i reset on almost a weekly basis) but the main reason is that you can get a really inexpensive small capacity SSD and still get the boot times of a SSD with way more capacity as the HDDBOOST becomes a single primary drive. not to mention if you just lost your installation disk for windows or heck, even the installation files for applications you can longer get (say you have a CAD program you installed a long time ago and only like the version you have and lost the disk, etc.) also sorry about the confusion about needing to purchase a separate SSD, figured it was a given that you would have to

[Kaos Kid]

What I meant was it appears that when you first hookup a drive with an OS already installed it copies over that OS to the SSD in the HDDBOOST. Then if you take out the original HDD and put a freshly formatted HDD back in, does it have a feature to copy all the files from the HDDBOOST's SSD back to your regular HDD, in effect making a backup drive you can either use or put away? That's what I meant by ghosting.

[skier]

What I meant was it appears that when you first hookup a drive with an OS already installed it copies over that OS to the SSD in the HDDBOOST. Then if you take out the original HDD and put a freshly formatted HDD back in, does it have a feature to copy all the files from the HDDBOOST's SSD back to your regular HDD, in effect making a backup drive you can either use or put away? That's what I meant by ghosting.

i know what you meant by it, by 'i'm not sure about it' i meant i really doubted it would work, and i just tried, if you pull the original HDD and still have the SSD in the HDDBOOST, on boot it gives:

Code: Select all

DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER

so no, it cannot transfer from the SSD to the HDD sadly

[Kaos Kid]

So it is established that you have to have a HDD in the HDDBOOST for it to operate even though a copy of the OS is on the SSD. The only other thing I would have to wonder is, would you only have to install the basic OS on a new HDD and then install it into the HDDBOOST and have it still boot up (and then perhaps be able to image the SSD onto the new drive, or at least the updated files augment over to the new HDD) . Dumb questions, I know, but that's how my mind works... Knowing me I'll obsess about this until I can get one of my own and experiment a little...

[skier]

if you pull the SSD out of the HDDBOOST, you cannot access the files (shows up as a unformatted).

[HONkUS]

Ok, so let me ask this. What happens if you have two of these things chained together? Like say have one with an SSD in it and then have the "SATA Out" that goes to the HDD go to another HDDBOOST that has two HDD's connected? Would we get that SSD benefit across two HDD drives? Or is that just mad scientist wishful thinking?

[skier]

dont think that would work either as it needs a single drive to boot from and i doubt it has the capability to run raid on that one little silverstone chip

[gwolfman]

Since you stated that most synthetic benchmarks use temp files, why couldn't you try using PCMark Vantage (I don't believe temporary files are created on each run) and/or Iometer where you had the test data created, let it run for a while during the time the SSD synced up, then saw how the results compared after X amount of time. Granted, this would be one of the hardest things to test since there is an inherent delay from syncing the selected data from the HDD to the SSD.