SilverStone HDDBoost gets reviewed, okayed for purchase by most Earthlings
By Darren Murph 
posted February 27th 2010 9:41AM
posted February 27th 2010 9:41AM
SilverStone's HDDBoost is an interesting, if not completely unique, offering. It's a relatively inexpensive (around $45) option for boosting performance in older machines, but it still requires the purchase of a decidedly not inexpensive SSD. For those with one already on hand (not to mention a traditional HDD), it allows you to have a RAID-type setup that provides peace of mind and a performance boost when it comes time to boot or load an application. Critics over at HardwareCanucks found that this little doohickey actually provided a noticeable increase in speed when coming from an older HDD-based setup, but those already using a WD Black Edition or Raptor probably "won't see much of a difference in terms of load times." They also point out that users should certainly use second-generation SSDs if picking one up, and if you've been searching for the next big breath of life to send to your aging desktop, you owe it to yourself to peek the full writeup.
Birthday present for my mother? Possibly.
@HardToBelieve im getting this for birthday. my pants owner really wants to give it to me if you know what i mean! He really likes my special effects after all thisn hype about SDD ima give it to him straight into him and tell him IM IN LOVE WITH SSD. not hdd. hdd is the past this is the future in my birthday. I am making him buy me sd. im really not into this specific hdd right now. more like air hogs and i dont like the smell of burning plastic metal fans dont do much
@emopoops
Could you use punctuation next time, 'cause I can't read that.
@emopoops Are you drunk?
Or boot exclusively off the SSD and use the second drive for storage, and you will get 100% full performance increase of the SSD... which blows my old raptors away.
With the current cost of a SSD i would be better off getting a newer processor and ram instead for my old desktop if I wanted to increase its performance.
@mnhthebest if you have very little RAM, that is true, but while W7's superfetch is very effective, have no doubt that your harddrive is the bottleneck if you're using a single 7200rpm regular platter drive or less on a core2duo w/ 3GB+ ram.
it's a very dumb cache that caches the first X sectors of an HDD to an SSD.
What we need instead, is some kind of ReadyBoost that uses an SSD instead of USB. Get to work, MS !
Can someone please explain to me how this contraption works? I read the source article (the review) and still can't seem to understand how it works or how it even worth buying. From what I've read the SSD "syncs" as much data from the platter drive as it can fit -- which means the SSD boost would only be shown theoretically on whatever data the platter drive 'synced' to the SSD. Correct?
@Gadget Lover Yeah. It sounds like a complete gimmick. And if this provides you piece of mind, then you'll have a bit of a shock coming when the main HDD dies, at the very least. This could potentially mess things up for you if the SSD happened to die as well. If you want the speed of an SSD, just boot from the SSD and use your other drive for storage. If you want piece of mind, use RAID 1. One thing you learn very quickly if you try anything more complicated than RAID 1/0 is there are so many things that have to be done right that all but the high end solutions almost certainly won't get them right. Even Intel's RAID 5 implementation barely works well enough to actually use.
@Gadget Lover
It doesn't work quite like a RAID 1. It seems it automaticaly backs up the SSD to the magnetic drive but only uses the SSD for actual operation. That way you don't have the SSD getting bottlenecked by the hard drive, but you get real-time backups.
@Gadget Lover It's my understanding is that this thing basically turns the SSD into a gigantic solid state cache for the platter drive.
Why would I want to back up my SSD to a magnetic drive? One of the advantages of an SSD is that it's much less prone to failure. This seems a bit strange to me.
Except this thing will prevent the trim command getting through to those second generation SSD drives and your SSD drive ends up being as slow as the single crap drive you're replacing...
Extremely disappointing. :( Until now I thought it would cache the blocks requested and then keep them, expiring the least requesting ones when full, not just cache the first [insert size of SSD here] bytes. I was REALLY looking forward to this but I guess I won't be buying one then.