Essentially it couples an SSD with a normal harddrive in a pseudo-raid type system. Basically you get all the speed of an SSD, but you also have the hard drive space of a larger drive. It also delays writes to the SSD, increasing the SSD's lifespan. Only for desktop setups, as the device won't fit into a laptop unless you mod it.

The HDDBoost is about $50 in addition to the price of the other drives.


http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canucks-reviews/29176-silverstone-hddboost-review.html

The controller works like this:

Reads-
If it's written on the SSD, then it fetches from the SSD
If it's not on the SSD, then it fetches from the Hard drive

Writes-
All writes are to the hard drive
The SSD is synced during boot or is now managed during an online interval with the new firmware.

Interesting idea. Not sure if I would go that way.

I've had this OCZ 120 Gb SSD since last summer and it's really great. The HDDBoost now lets me have a complete boot drive with all my programs and games installed on the boot drive which is what I want, without sacrificing any speed to the larger normal Sata hard drive. It's awesome, I'd recommend it to anyone with an SSD in their desktop.

I read the article and it doesn't seem so great. Nothing in that article convinced me to consider it. Maybe they should have used a better SSD? You must have a lot of shit installed to need more than the 120GB for your boot drive. I only use 20GB of my 74GB Raptor. I don't game anymore and have only one or two older games installed. I suppose nowadays each game can take up 5GB-8GB installed.

I'd need to see another review using a better performing SSD (ex. 120GB+ Indilinx drives, 100GB Sandforce, Marvell C300, new JMicron drives).

Reread the conclusion notes if you're confused as to how the test results came out. Essentially the test results show that there is very little loss in performance when using the HDDBoost over using the SSD alone. There is a slight cost to using the unit, but it is very small and nearly unnoticeable.

Currently my boot is around 200 Gbs with all my steam games installed.

Also, one of the main reasons to use the unit (delayed writes to the SSD) should prolong the life of the SSD quite a bit.

I looked at all the graphs and I was not impressed or confused. The conclusion notes are the reviewers opinions. The life expectancy of SSDs is still unknown. If it's a concern, don't buy one or save up for one that uses SLC NAND chips. That's why they should only be used as a boot drive and a HDD should also be installed for storage. Plus, backups should be made of important data. Even HDDs fail and don't always last long.

HDDBoost looks like a cheap way to get better HDD speed using a cheap SSD.

I'm pretty sure you're confused. Confused and bewildered. lol

By your thinking, I am.

I looked into buying a solid state drive but the price for them are way too high at the moment I was looking at a 74gig drive for nearly £200

They dont tend to have great reviews either, while they are good for speed none of the reviews I read would commit to any length of time that these drives would last.

I liked the idea though of them never needing to be defragged