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 - |
| Share: |
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Western Digital SATA 150 Results
Now I installed the HDDBOOST into the family computer (Dell Dimension 4700 with a Pentium 4 HT 3.0GHz & 2GB DDR2 533MHz) which has an early Western Digital 160GB SATA I drive in it running a year old copy of XP Home 32-Bit. This copy of XP is fairly new compared to the old installation which was ~5 years running, and the drive itself has been spinning away for almost 46,000 hrs.
The drive by itself booted XP to desktop in approximately 26 seconds. With the SST-HDDBOOST installed and synced, the boot time dropped to 15 seconds, which is impressive considering the motherboard natively runs SATA 150 which bottlenecks the SSD. I can imagine using the SATA 150 drive in a SATA 3Gbps motherboard with the HDDBOOST would be closer to a 75% improvement in boot times.
Using Teracopy again we see some pretty nice gains, but in a more confusing manner because the giant .raw image and .avi file continued to copy at the same pace, while the installer file copied nearly twice as fast as originally. Now let's get back into the synthetic testing.
ATTO Disk Benchmark v2.46: Western Digital SATA 150
The Write/Read speeds on this drive are somewhat decent considering its age around 55MB/s each. However, there are only ~8GB used on the Western Digital 160GB drive so this is an ideal scenario for this drive.
ATTO Disk Benchmark v2.46: HDDBOOST + Western Digital SATA 150
Since there is so little used space on the hard drive the ATTO Disk Benchmark application could utilize the SSD nearly doubling the read speeds. Not bad considering the motherboard can only support a theoretical burst speed which is not much higher than this!
CrystalDiskMark v2.2: Western Digital SATA 150
In CrystalDiskMark the Western Digital 160GB drive sported even lower read/write speeds than ATTO, right at 50MB/s each.
CrystalDiskMark v2.2: HDDBOOST + Western Digital SATA 150
With the HDDBOOST installed the read speeds got bumped up by ~17MB/s with the write speed staying the same again. This is not nearly the gain seen in ATTO but that must have something to do with how/where the different benchmarking applications set the temporary file.
HD Tune Pro v4.50: Western Digital SATA 150
I don't really expect any change in random access performance, but there it is.
HD Tune Pro v4.50: HDDBOOST + Western Digital SATA 150
With the HDDBOOST installed the operations/second increased slightly as did average access time and average speed which surprised me, but it's not much of a gain aside from a couple ms access time per test and a few percent better average speed.
HD Tach v3.0.4: Western Digital SATA 150
A majority of the HDD had read speeds above 50MB/s, falling off sharply in the outer 60GB of the disk.
HD Tach v3.0.4: HDDBOOST + Western Digital SATA 150
Here you can really see the limitations of the original SATA interface with the 30GB (SSD) of the SST-HDDBOOST being pinned up at 115MB/s read speed with a burst speed of 126.7MB/s -- much the same as the mechanical drive.
I also have to mention that the SST-HDDBOOST 1008 chip got very hot to the touch inside the DELL Dimension 4700 chassis. I would simply have to suggest not purchasing this for a computer built before 2005 as a full system upgrade would be a much better route and early DELL chassis designs were very poor at dealing with heat.
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