SilverStone HDDBoost Review

Random Access Time

HDDBoost = WD 320GD HDD + Kingston SSDNow 40GB

To obtain the absolute, most accurate Random access time, h2benchw was used for this benchmark. This benchmark tests how quickly different areas of the drive can be accessed. A low number means that the drive space can be accessed quickly while a high number means that more time is taken trying to access different parts of the drive. To run this program, one must use a DOS prompt and tell it what sections of the test to run. While one could use “h2benchw 1 -english -s -tt "harddisk test" -w test” for example and just run the seek tests, we took the more complete approach and ran the full gamut of tests and then extracted the necessary information from the text file. This is the command line argument we used “h2benchw 1 -a -! -tt "harddisk drivetest" -w drivetest”. This tells the program to write all results in english, save them in drivetest.txt file, do write and read tests and do it all on drive 1 (or the second drive found, with 0 being the OS drive).


There is no getting around the fact that the single platter version of the Western Digital 320GB drive is a less than optimal drive when it comes to latency. However, even when hobbled with such a less than optimal drive our Hybrid setup does post a much more respectable full drive latency average of 13.41ms. Even more interesting was the fact that while the Kingston SSDNow V 40GB has 0.07ms latency when on its own the “lower 512mb” portion of this test shows the Hybrid setup having 0.12ms latency. This tells us there is about 0.05ms latency added to the equation when you use the HDDBoost system but that is a performance hit we are willing to take any day of the week as it is so small as to not only be unnoticeable but negligible in the grand scheme of things.