Legit Mods and Ends Reviews
SilverStone HDDBOOST Review
| Manufacturer: | SilverStone |
| Product: | SST-HDDBOOST |
| Date: | Fri, Jul 30, 2010 - 12:00 AM |
| Written By: | Austin Hamann - |
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The SilverStone HDDBOOST
SilverStone Technology is really all over the place as far products, offering everything from CPU coolers to power supplies to cases and gaming mice among many other accessories. Today, what we're looking at from SilverStone is called a HDDBOOST, listed as a "Turbo Storage Device" on the SilverStone site. This boot performance boosting accessory currently retails for $49.99, which is a small price premium for what this offers.
The SST (SilverStoneTek) HDDBOOST combines the spectacular read speeds of an SSD boot drive with the massive storage capacity of mechanical drives. This concept took a while for me to wrap my head around, and didn't totally sink in until I started to get into the manual:
Basically, once you plug in the HDDBOOST it begins to copy the windows files from the HDD already installed. Then, once it is set up and fully mirrored, at boot the operating system runs from just the SSD instead of the HDD, resulting in significantly faster boot times without having to reinstall your current OS or having to worry about partitions or secondary installation locations. Everything is done on the HDD and then copied to the SSD (which becomes a single entity) with the ability to remove the HDDBOOST at any time to revert back to the HDD as a boot disk. The ease of use factor here is huge because you can just take a six year old installation of XP and make it boot almost as fast as a regular SSD except without sacrificing storage or having to even touch the files on the hard drive: a seamless drop-in upgrade.
"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."
HDDBOOST Features
- Boost your original system HDD read speed without reinstalling OS
- Minimum SSD data write times help extend SSD life-cycle
- Easy to install
- Compatible with most of 2.5” SATA SSD
- Compatible with any OS with SATA interface support, Windows 7
- 3.5” Internal hard drive bay form factor
- Bracket fabricated from 1.0 mm SPCC with Nickel Plating
The front of the HDDBOOST is pretty simple -- just a small PCB with in/out SATA connectors screwed down to a steel 3.5" profile bracket. The top SATA connector goes from the HDDBOOST to the motherboard, the lower SATA connectors are for power input and the SATA cable is to connect to the HDD. Notice the bottom connectors do not have locking clips for the data cable; I am not positive how well the cables will stay put as SATA cables tend to come loose with the bracket -- I can't imagine without it. For those wondering, the chip on the right reads SilverStone SST-HDDBOOST 1008.
The back side of the PCB is packed with a bit more hardware, including the SATA data and power connectors for your SSD.
To install the SSD simply slide the drive into the connectors on the PCB then screw it in via two holes in the bottom of the nickel bracket.
Next Page - Retail Box & Bundle
| Review Index |
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Page 1 - The SilverStone HDDBOOST
Page 2 - Retail Box & Bundle Page 3 - Test Settings Page 4 - Seagate Momentus XT Results Page 5 - Western Digital SATA 150 Results Page 6 - Final Thoughts & Conclusions |
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