HDDBoost - Combines an SSD with your existing hard disk

Unknown-One

Unknown-One

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SilverStone has just announced its HDDBoost, a device that teams an SSD with a hard disk. The aim is to offer the incredibly fast data access speeds typical of SSDs with the high capacity of a hard disk but to make it easy to use, so both appear as a single storage device in Windows. Essentially, the HDDBoost uses an SSD as an huge cache for your hard disk, theoretically delivering the best of both technologies with no compromise. This sounds almost as magical as the Lucid Hydra, but with a much better chance of success.
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Source link: http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2010/02/03/silverstone-announces-hybrid-ssd-hard-disk/1

Very interesting, if it proves to do what it claims. I'll be interested to see performance numbers once the device is actually launched. If it works, it sounds like it could spur on the sales of smaller SSD's.
 
I see this as one of those ideas that's "neat" but ultimately useless for results that don't justify the cost and complexity.
 
Kinda reminds me of those "hybrid" hard disks we were promised around the time Vista was launched, with a large chunk of flash memory integrated into a normal hard disk.

Since that hardware never came out, this offers a do-it-yourself solution to accomplish the same ends.
 
As someone pointed out in the BT comments, this could make non-cached accesses slower (first it has to check the SSD, then fall back to the HDD). Also, it sounds like the SSD just caches a copy of the HDD data, so you're also losing some space overall (1TB HDD + __GB SSD = 1TB of usable space).

Depending on exactly how well it's programmed, I think it could be something pretty cool, or it could add a lot of complexity and some extra cost, while not providing a whole lot of benefit. Hoping for the best, but wouldn't be too surprised by the worst either.
 
Thought this would be an interesting product when I first heard about it, but after reading the manual I found it's biggest flaw = NO WRITE CACHING!

I wrote up a couple more pros and cons about this product on my blog here: http://scott.thefillers.net/2010/02/silverstone-hddboost/.

What I don't get is why doesn't someone just plug the SSD into their motherboard, install a fresh copy of Win7 (don't forget TRIM support) and use the existing HDD as a data drive? With the SSD as your primary boot drive you get full control and acceleration (r/w) of your OS + programs. Plus with Bios supported boot drive selection you can always swap back to your HDD till you have completely migrated your settings and programs to your SSD.
 
I just read the manual from the Silverstone site. The only way to keep the SSD cached with your latest data is to reboot often. It re-caches/re-syncs the two drives during POST. I wouldn't have an issue with this as I shut my machine down every night. But for people who don't regularly shut down or reboot this could be an issue as you have to do this manual reboots often to keep the speed up.
 
sfsilicon said:
What I don't get is why doesn't someone just plug the SSD into their motherboard, install a fresh copy of Win7 (don't forget TRIM support) and use the existing HDD as a data drive? With the SSD as your primary boot drive you get full control and acceleration (r/w) of your OS + programs. Plus with Bios supported boot drive selection you can always swap back to your HDD till you have completely migrated your settings and programs to your SSD.
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That's precisely what I did... sans the Win7, but that's in the works.
 
sfsilicon said:
What I don't get is why doesn't someone just plug the SSD into their motherboard, install a fresh copy of Win7 (don't forget TRIM support) and use the existing HDD as a data drive? With the SSD as your primary boot drive you get full control and acceleration (r/w) of your OS + programs. Plus with Bios supported boot drive selection you can always swap back to your HDD till you have completely migrated your settings and programs to your SSD.
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Yeah, I don't see the upside in having a 3rd party controller arbitrarily choosing what to cache to the SSD, etc... If you're currently working w/a large file and you wanna speed up how fast it loads just drag it to the desktop/SSD from your HD and work on it, simple as that... Otherwise there's not much else that the typical user constantly works with that he couldn't fit into a medium-sized SSD unless he's dealing w/several large VMs or something like that (and that would be out of the scope of the typical user).
 
There were some reviews eventually, I think they were average, you could now do the same with a Z68 board or even some software solutions tho.
 
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