SilverStone HDDBoost Review

Real World Data Transfers

HDDBoost = WD 320GD HDD + Kingston SSDNow 40GB

No matter how good a synthetic benchmark like IOMeter or PCMark is, it cannot really tell you how your hard drive will perform in “real world” situations. All of us here at Hardware Canucks strive to give you the best, most complete picture of a review item’s true capabilities and to this end we will be running timed data transfers to give you a general idea of how its performance relates to real life use. To help replicate worse case scenarios we will transfer a 4.00GB contiguous RAR file and a folder containing 49 subfolders with a total 2108 files varying in length from 20mb to 1kb (1.00 GB total).

Testing will include transfer to and transferring from the devices, timing each process individually to provide an approximate Read and Write performance. To then stress the dive even more we will then make a copy of the large file to another portion of the same drive and then repeat the process with the small one. This will test the drive to its limits as it will be reading and writing simultaneously. Here is what we found.


After running these tests we can say with reasonable certainty that the device does not swap out data on the solid state drive unless you explicitly tell it to via the HDDBoost Utility or by rebooting the system. This to us is a good thing and these numbers really do show that while you may not get the full power of the solid state drive, you do get most of it. In return for a little bit of lost power you do get the freedom of not needing to worry about firmware updates, AHCI vs. IDE, ITGC, TRIM or other terms which may be gobbledygook to the average consumer. That is a trade we are sure many people will be willing to make.