SilverStone HDDBoost

[PrometheusCon]

HDDBOOST is a unique product that combines the best qualities of traditional hard drive and solid state disk (SSD) into one virtual super storage solution. Depending on the speed of the SSD added, the HDDBOOST can increase the performance of an existing host hard drive up to 70%(*)! This speed increase is very noticeable and significant for any PC users that have not experienced using SSD drives before. For those who are not ready to compromise on storage capacity and reliability for speed, HDDBOOST will enable SSD speed on its host hard drive and reduce the write times to SSD’s more fragile flash-based storage system, thus extending its effective lifetime

http://www.silverstonetek.com/produc...=HDDBOOST&area

More news here:
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardwar...sd-hard-disk/1

TB of cheap storage with SSD(ish) speeds? Auntie Em! Auntie Em!

[The_Beast]

Sounds very cool to me and isn't too expensive

[zalbard]

Sooo... how does it pick what to cache and what not to? Does it cache executables only? Or does it cache according to the last file access?
I am suspicious about this being actually a great product. You can't really put all the data from 1TB HDD onto a 80GB SSD... Probably makes more sense to use both drives separately and fill them in a way that makes the most sense. But heck, what do I know, let's see some reviews!

As soon as you install the HDDBoost, it performs a mirror backup of the most commonly used hard disk files to the SSD.

So looks like it simply sorts all the files according to the time of the last access and puts all of them onto your SSD till it's full, and as you access more files it erases those you haven't accessed for a while from a SSD and copies the data from the HDD you've just accessed.
Pretty smart.
But is it necessary? I think I'd rather stick with separate drives.

[lowfat]

Very intriguing. Could be a great product as long as it works as well as it says.

[PeterStoba]

Seems very gimmicky, not sure if it'll actually be any good...

[josh1980]

I don't expect this to be a big performance improver to be honest. There was an application similar to Vista's "Readyboost" technology, but it allowed you to use a second hard drive (I tried it with an ANS-9010 SATA RAMDRIVE on RAID-0 for max performance) and the performance boost wasn't all that noticable. It was there, just not significant. Running a large windows application like Office, Adobe CS3, etc has alot (and I mean alot) of dependency DLLs and such. I filled my 32GB drive as a cache and the performance still wasn't big. Overall, I won't be buying something like this. Even if the hard drive had a 32GB cache on it's drive, that's what percent of your drive? .01%? I see this only working for a very small segment of the market.

It might help casual home users where they could cache their entire OS and all applications, but any kind of power user will find this device very limiting after installing it. I'm sure the benchmarks will get alot of us geeks to buy it though, and then be disappointed.

Overall I see this as a dead-end product that has no actual segment of the market to target. Casual users won't spend this kind of dough for the speed increase(even then, why buy this device AND an SSD when they could just go buy the SSD outright?) The power users would rather have a real SSD and real hard drive for simplicity to decrease the chance of something going wrong and corrupting data.

[jmke]

Seems very gimmicky, not sure if it'll actually be any good...

I'm with you on this one;
hybrid drives have not been popular for a reason

[SADS]

personally, i cant see the any massive advantages of this over using an SSD as an 'apps' drive, with a HDD as you 'big storage' drive.

fair enough it gives the SSD the preferential treatment when caching, but im not sold that this will have a huge performance improvement over just putting your fave apps onto SSD in the first place.

[Manicdan]

one thing i think might be a problem is how it decides to use your SSD for you. i like to keep mine about half full, so the read/write cycles have more time until the drive used all the memory, and gives me more time until i need to run trim/wiper. if this thing fills it up 90+%, then it wont be long until you should run a trim/wiper app. i also may not care if certain things load slower, however to the same respect, some things like steam force me to use one folder, and if this hides the drive in the background, then steam wont know where it came from, so it could speed up certain games without me having to worry about where its saved.

i think with the right application to manage this, it could be a really sweet tool. however, its also something that could be very easily messed up. but props for thinking outside the box.

[Gilhooley]

After the initial mirroring of data is completed, SSD and HDD will have the same frontend data. HDDBOOST’s controller chip will then set data read priority to SSD to take advantage of SSD’s much faster read speed. HDDBOOST’s priority will be determined by the following rules:
1.When data is present on both drives, read from SSD.
2.When data is not present on both drives, read from HDD.
3.Data will only be written to HDD.
Every time the system starts, HDDBOOST will initiate mirror backup automatically to ensure front-end data between the two drives are the same.

Q: How does HDDBOOST extend the life of SSD?
A: In normal operating system environment, a system drive gets written onto constantly until the system is turned off. Compared to using SSD only as the main system drive, HDDBOOST will only write to SSD once sequentially during system boot up when it activates mirror backup. This significantly reduces the wear and tear that normally occurs when writing data to SSD.

Q: Will HDDBOOST damage/lose the original hard drive data?
A: In general use, the data will be fully written to the hard drive, so no data would be lost.
The Mirror backup process will not write data to the hard drive, thus eliminating the chance of data loss. Even if SSD wears out or HDDBOOST’s controller malfunctions, the original hard drive can still be used to boot the system normally.

---

bah, to little to late today jmicron drives are not cheaper $/GB.. only exception would be Kingston SSDNow V series.

[SKYMTL]

Thought you guys might be interested in a review of this.

YOU CAN FIND IT HERE

[kuhla]

Thought you guys might be interested in a review of this.

YOU CAN FIND IT HERE

kewl thanks

[Dragy2k]

nice review ...thanks sky

[saaya]

great idea, but it doesnt seem to work very well at all...
its faster to install windows and apps on a 40gb ssd and have everything else on the hdd

[jmke]

its faster to install windows and apps on a 40gb ssd and have everything else on the hdd

and cheaper too and no need to sync, use third party "tools"
can be configured to plug and play without issue.

the HDDboost requires enough tech knowledge that the advantage for "set and forget" is no longer valid as an argument for "novice users", who wouldn't even know how to install it.

[annihilat0r]

Each game takes 10gb, though...

[FlawleZ]

Each game takes 10gb, though...

Really? What games are you playing? There's maybe a couple that take up that kind of space by default.

[ScorpionHD]

Crysis, Half Life 2 w/ CM4>, Console port games too

[ScorpionHD]

This thing is just a Raid 1/2 its half because you are not getting the fill mirror only the size of your SSD. The constant need for re-syncing will kill me, I am the

"set and forget"

type of user and usually dislike things like that, because they take away from productive time.

[RaZz!]

Really? What games are you playing? There's maybe a couple that take up that kind of space by default.

a couple? hehe, most games need around 7-12 gb nowadays.

just checked a few that i've got installed atm:
- gears of war 10gb
- gta 4 15gb
- fear 2 11gb
- dragon age origins 18gb
- call of duty modenr warfare 2 11gb
- race driver grid 10gb

just to name a few. most of the other ones are around 8gb. so to say 10gb per game isn't that far off.

[ScorpionHD]

a couple? hehe, most games need around 7-12 gb nowadays.

just checked a few that i've got installed atm:
- gears of war 10gb
- gta 4 15gb
- fear 2 11gb
- dragon age origins 18gb
- call of duty modenr warfare 2 11gb
- race driver grid 10gb

just to name a few. most of the other ones are around 8gb. so to say 10gb per game isn't that far off.

8gb and 10gb is a big difference

8gb and 10gb on a 64GB SSD is a lot and yes almost make no difference

those games listed above may *require* that much space as listed in specs but this isnt size on disk is it?

[SKYMTL]

The main thing that's emphasized by SilverStone is ease of use in a set it and forget it type of way. It's extremely easy to for first time users to just plug it in and get better performance.

[BababooeyHTJ]

and cheaper too and no need to sync, use third party "tools"
can be configured to plug and play without issue.

the HDDboost requires enough tech knowledge that the advantage for "set and forget" is no longer valid as an argument for "novice users", who wouldn't even know how to install it.

SSDs aren't set it and forget it at this point in time. I wouldn't call my Vertex reliable.

8gb and 10gb is a big difference

8gb and 10gb on a 64GB SSD is a lot and yes almost make no difference

those games listed above may *require* that much space as listed in specs but this isnt size on disk is it?

The only games that I would want to run on an SSD is Oblivion FO3, HL2 with the CM mod, etc. Games with a lot of mods basically. Oblivion alone all modded up can easily turn into a 30GB folder.

[ulticool]

So it's just using the cache? Why not just use cheaper memory sticks like most ppl have piles of.

[Serra]

I just can't help but think "Quasimodo" whenever I see this thing. I think the original concept was nifty, but once you get into the details with syncing and such it really turns very ugly.

What I would like to see is a very simple controller with either a slanted (for space) DDR2/DDR3 slot or ~2GB of memory chips on-board. It would be fitted such that you can slide a standard 3.5" drive into it (like the 2.5" fits into this thing) and all it does is a bit of read-ahead when it is not being overwhelmed with requests and otherwise caching the last X amount of data, where X is the cache size. That way you could still get the benefits of SSD's for "small" file access (which the majority of what people do is), but without the syncing bother. Basically I think I want a caching RAID card that can't do RAID or handle multiple drives and costs 1/10th the price as a result.