SilverStone HDDBoost Review

Closer Look at the SilverStone HDDBoost

As you can see SilverStone certainly did not waste much time or resources on the HDDBoost’s packaging. For all intents and purposes this is a brown cardboard box with details, specifications and a schematic of the HDDBoost printed in black ink on it. Over all it may be bland but it certainly is more than good enough to keep the HDDBoost safe and sound in transit.

The list of accessories is short and sweet and this is par for the course considering the value orientated price niche this unit occupies. In a nut shell you get mounting screws, a thick multi-language instruction pamphlet and even a short, red SATA cable. The only thing conspicuous by its absence was a CD with the HDDBoost application on it. Rather, the applications we will be talking about in the next section are freely available on SilverStone’s website.


This is a very basic looking device and upon first glance it looks nothing more than a hot swap 2.5 to 3.5 drive adapter which has been beefed up a bit more than usual.


The metal chassis of the HDDBoost has holes drilled into the bottom and sides to allow for securely mounting both the 2.5” SSD inside it and the HDDBoost to your case’s 3.5” hard drive cage. The SSD of course slides into the back of the unit where a standard SATA power and communications ports have been install onto the PCB.


Looking at the back of the unit you can see there is not only SATA ports for a 2.5” to 3.5” hot swap SATA adaptor but also a large chip which usually has no place residing on something as simple as a adapter. This is where the simplistic first impression goes off the rails and the secret of the HDDBoost starts to come to light.


The controller chip is labelled “SST-HDDBOOST 10005” and tells is us very little about what it actually is, but it does shed a lot of light onto the capabilities and limitations of the HDDBoost. Since there are no external RAM nor NAND chips to be found anywhere on this device, we can make the reasonable assumption that the HDDBoost is going to have very basic cloning functions as there is simply nowhere to store (in a non-volatile format) the information needed for making incremental backups.

When you reboot your system this controller most likely initiates a full clone procedure and if this is the case and it can not prioritize synchronization, reboot times could be down right brutal on even relatively small 30GB solid state drives; no matter how fast your drives are, moving that amount of data does take time. However, there is a good possibility that this System On a Chip does have a trick up its sleeve to prevent this and other issues from popping up. After all it would very easy simply have the SoC give low priority to the synchronization process and even pause it when peak demand happens (which is what happens when you reboot).

If this is the case, the first boot up after installing the HDDBoost should in theory only take as long (or maybe slightly longer due to increased latency from the HDDBoost and its controller) as it did using only your old hard drive. The only down side to doing things this way and prioritizing things in a logical manner is that the longer the system is up and running the less data it will be able to read from the SSD upon the next reboot. This does have the potential to make booting up your system extremely variable with anything from SSD levels of performance to your original HDD level of performance to something in between. We are betting that this is how SilverStone has done things and that most reboots will fall somewhere in between these two extremes.


Moving onto the SATA ports we have the typical SATA power port which of course supplies power to both the device and the SSD. The top SATA port connects from the HDDBoost’s PCB to your motherboard while the bottom one goes from the HDDBoost to your chosen hard drive. This in a nutshell ties the SSD, HDD and controller into one big loop with the onboard controller being responsible for what data is sent to the SSD and to the HDD. This is also what allows the unit to clone data from the hard drive to the solid state drive without needing the involvement of the motherboard or your computer’s other components.


The other benefit to doing things this way is the HDDBoost and its two devices are seen by your computer’s BIOS as one single drive. Thus there should be no compatibility issues at the physical level with the HDDBoost, or at least none as long as you have room for two drives in your drive cage.


At the physical level the HDDBoost is a raid controller, but we can see one minor potential downside to doing things this way. The downside we can see is that unlike true hardware or software RAID controllers (which bypass the motherboard SATA controller and use PCI/PCI-E/etc lanes) or even motherboard software raid this unit shares one SATA rev 2.0 port for both drives. So, as long as you don’t use a high end modern solid state drive which can do 230+MB/s sequential reads, this not going to be a big deal. However, in the future we hope to see this device with SATA 6Gbps compatibility.