SilverStone HDDBoost Review Comment Thread

[SKYMTL]

Many people have shied away from SSDs due to their somewhat limited storage capacity and high price for the drives. Spindle-based hard drives on the other hand have massive amounts of storage space but lack the performance of SSDs. SilverStone’s $50 HDDBoost looks to marry the best of both worlds by allowing us to seamlessly link a budget SSD to a hard drive for increased performance. However, does it work?

You can find the review here: SilverStone HDDBoost Review

Please use this thread for your questions and comments.

[Zero82z]

Last page, "Software needs an FAQ" should be "a FAQ" .

[headsh0t]

lol @ gobbledygook. I thought it was goobledygock? lolz Didn't fully read the review just kinda looked at the numbers. Doesn't seem to great, at least to me. Is the write speed really that bad on the Kingston 40gb SSD??? I'll read the full thing tomorrow incase I missed anything.

[AkG]

gobbledygook - definition of gobbledygook by the Free Online Dictionary, Thesaurus and Encyclopedia.

The write speed is not the fault of the SSD. It was the less than stellar HDD used. All writes except during synchronization are directed to the HDD.
Basically this unit as three main laws it follows:
1) IF the data is on both the HDD and SSD it reads from the SSD
2) If the data is only on the HDD, it reads from the HDD
3) all writes (except for synchronization) go to the HDD.

[bojangles]

Neato! This product definitely does provide a speed boost for the most part, especially on older systems. How often does it sync?

[SKYMTL]

Originally Posted by bojangles

Neato! This product definitely does provide a speed boost for the most part, especially on older systems. How often does it sync?

While AkG can answer that, I would manually sync it after installing a program.

[AkG]

The only time it will sync on its own is after a reboot. There is no way to setup a timer (say once a day) and this is one weakness of this unit I hope SilverStone address.

[thorn]

how long does it take to sync?

It seems kind of pointless to me, you would be better of using both separately.

[AkG]

Sync happens seamlessly in the background. You literally would not notice it doing its thing unless you open up the HDDBoost Utility and watch the percentage go up. With the Kingston SSDNow V it took about 30 minutes or so to finish.

Its going to be good for people who already own a hard drive and want to improve performance of their system but cant afford a large SSD. If you pick up a used SSD like the Kingston SSDnow V "on the cheap". You end up with a much more responsive system. You wont need to worry about TRIM (or lack thereof) or cloning your hard drive to the SSD, or setting AHCI mode or any of the other little tweaks that make a SSD system shine. It really is a plug and play device. Setting up a SSD or cloning a HDD doesn't sound that daunting to the avg enthusiast BUT it can be a BIG deal to people who don't upgrade very often.

[gingerbee]

personally i would not buy one i would buy 2 ssd's . but i can see where this has a market for people who want speed but also need room throw a cheap vertex/intel v with any of the new sata3 hdd's and should do ok.