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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Seagate Momentus XT Results
The Seagate Momentus XT booted to desktop in ~15 seconds which isn't great, but I've had much worse drives. Once the HDDBOOST was installed, sync'd and updated I rebooted and came in with a time of about 8 seconds. The SST-HDDBOOST improved boot time by seven seconds on one of the fastest HDDs on the market! Boot speed is the primary reason to opt for an SSD and SilverStone's HDDBOOST certainly does well at that, giving you the option to pick up a small capacity, budget SSD to get the great boot times without worrying about running out of space.
Real World Usage - Teracopy v2.1
Teracopy is a very unique application which logs how long it takes to copy and move a file slightly faster than Windows can alone. To my surprise (and delight), the HDDBOOST improved copy & transfer speeds for every type of file used! I am really surprised that the most greatly affected transfers were the 605 .mp3's and unzipped Photoshop CS5 folder at a staggering 43% and 13% improvements, respectively, where the single large-file transfers only improved slightly.
ATTO Disk Benchmark v2.46: Momentus XT
The Seagate Momentus XT is one of the fastest mechanical drives currently on the market, at up around 104MB/s read and write speed currently with the Windows 7 Ultimate x64 Operating System and an additional ~20GB of programs. I do not expect a great difference with the HDDBOOST in ATTO, Crystal or HD tune random access tests as mentioned before they use temporary files that do not go on the SSD.
ATTO Disk Benchmark v2.46: HDDBOOST + Momentus XT
In ATTO with the HDDBOOST the transfer speeds actually dropped by about 10MB/s likely because of the added time it takes to bypass the HDDBOOST controller going from the motherboard to the HDD where the temporary file is located.
CrystalDiskMark v2.2: Momentus XT
In CrystalDiskMark the Momentus XT had ~102MB/s sequential read and ~97MB/s write speeds.
CrystalDiskMark v2.2: HDDBOOST + Momentus XT
Again dropping 10MB/s for the sequential tests with the HDDBOOST in CrystalDiskMark.
HD Tune Pro v4.50: Momentus XT
In the random access test the Momentus XT had very good results with the exception of the random bits up at 100-325ms.
HD Tune Pro v4.50: HDDBOOST + Momentus XT
For random access the HDDBOOST drops the Operations/sec significantly at 512 bytes, 4KB, and 64KB tests from 500-1000op/s to down under 60op/s with much higher average access time for each test.
HD Tach v3.0.4: Momentus XT
In the most relevant test, HD Tach, the Momentus XT starts off up at the 110MB/s mark then doesn't really start to drop off until the 150GB mark, ending up way down at 55MB/s at the very edge of the disk.
HD Tach v3.0.4: HDDBOOST + Momentus XT
With the SST-HDDBOOST we are using a 40GB SSD so the the first 30GB has very good read access because it is reading just the SSD. Once it goes beyond the 30GB mark the hard drive performance is being testing and performance drops as the SSD is no longer being used. The curve to 500GB is much the same as before with just that initial jump for the 30GB SSD.
Next Page - Western Digital SATA 150 Results
| 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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