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

I went looking online for comparisons of ssd vs sata or sas.
I then saw some videos on youtube showing the boot times for windows xp on two identical laptops.
for the amount of money involved, I cannot see the justification for that extra cost for a mere 5 to 15 second difference. but to each their own, I wouldn't invest in it now, maybe at a much later date when they get capacity up to disk standards.

That would cut my boot time in half =oD
Still not worth it, though.

I would add "read-only" in there somewhere. Does your boot drive include your operating system, which in turn includes a tmp directory / swap file? Most do by default, so moving that swap space could be a vital step in preserving the life of the drive.

my slowest machine boots up in 45 seconds, what will 15 seconds make?
even if it took 2 minutes to boot half is a minute. I just don't see the logic for home users nor any small/medium size business needing that small performance gain for the amout of the cost. there are far easier ande simplier things that can be done to increase performance without the cost. then there's the reliability issue. and with all the don't put this on it or that to preserve it's life, that's more headache than what it's worth to me.

I'll stick with sata/sas for now.

I have never seen a 74GB SSD drive. I would recheck that. All the reviews are usually good to great (except for the early JMicron drives that stuttered). Even the lower end SSDs are faster than 99% of HDDs.

No one knows how long these drives will last. They don't have a long enough history in consumer hands to predict reliability, plus the technology is relatively new.

SSDs do more than just speed up boot time. Everyday normal use is faster. Everything is just smoother. You don't have to wait for a response.

SSDs remove one of the last few bottlenecks. A lot of people want to see larger SSDs now. In time they will come. When the NAND chips get another die shrink, sizes will double. I still think SSDs should only be used as a boot drive. Until we know reliability of these drives, HDDs should be used as storage.

If you use a SDD, you should disable disk defragmentation (not needed, only decreases life span of SSD). Also DISABLE drive indexing, prefetch and superfetch. All not needed.

If possible, don't download files to your SDD and move your pagefile to HDD.

Like any new technology there will be kinks to work out and some fine tuning to be done.

KINGSTON SNV125-S2BD SSDNow V-Series Internal 2.5" SATA Solid State Drive - 64GB
£119.99



KINGSTON SNV125-S2BD SSDNow V-Series Internal 2.5" SATA Solid State Drive - 128GB £209.99


I re-checked and these were the 2 I guess if you look around they will be cheaper I just looked at pc world

Ask yourself this is it really worth the extra money and to top it all off windows aint ready for these drives at the moment or you wouldn;t have to disable this and that

Temp director[y,ies], too. You can create a ramdisk for it for extra snappiness if you have sufficient memory.

I use an 8GB Compact Flash 133x compact flash drive for my servers OS.
Speed is not the only reason to switch to a flash based drive.

Face it, even if ya go SSD, you'll probably replace before it hits it death bed.
No harm in wanting a bit of extra spunk, or something unique to set your self apart from the pack.

I see many places I'd like to use and SSD. But for now price wise, I use CF cards.

All hard drives fail, one of the first things I was ever taught about computer hard disks is that they will all fail at some point. That became etched on the back of my brain early on when I had a hard drive failure and lost months of work, hence I back my shit up more than a hooker touches a pole (metal or other).

That said I still have a hard drive from the mid-1980s that works today- but I'm not using it every day, of course.

If you're going to pay the extra $$$ for an SSD, what good is it to be selective what goes where (other than space considerations)? I understand the thought in keeping its lifespan longer by not storing what's going to be written to it, and keeping what IS going to be written to disk constantly on the HDD, but you're already rather defeating the merits of an SSD, IMO. I would most definitely put my page file (and scratch files from programs such as Photoshop) on an SSD.

Chances are if you can afford/justify an SSD today you'll have enough $$$ to buy another one whenever it fails, especially when prices drop.

I'm not 100% hooked on SSD and I do think it has a lot of maturing to do, so I don't think I'll be replacing my SATA/IDE drives anytime soon. But I am looking at a 128GB Patriot SSD for my next project, it's all the space I'll need for what I need it for.

I find it interesting m2h is using CF for storing his OS. I've had thumb drives I've constantly added/deleted data to over what feels like 5-6 years, they still work and one particular little sturdy 256 Sandisk has survived going through my washer & dryer.

Windows 7 is ready for SSDs. It supports TRIM to keep the drives at optimal performance. Disabling those Windows features is easy enough. It would be nice if Windows could detect if a SSD was being used as a boot drive and automatically disable them, but no big deal. They don't affect performance, they are just not needed because SSDs don't have the deficiencies that HDDs have.

I didn't think that superfetch does much random writing. I would imagine it keeps track of what it's indexing, but it's performance gains would be hard for me to want to give up.

From all the reputable review sites that I read, they all say to disable superfetch (and the others). Maybe with HDDBoost it's still needed.

Superfetch loads your more often opened stuff into unused RAM so it loads way faster. I just read that it keeps a log of your most often loaded processes, so I guess that log being rewritten might be a concern for people with only an SSD.

The way information is written to SSD's keeps it living for a long time past your death. So all these tiny writes is not a concern. Little each time it writes, it writes to a different place than the last time.

Now if you are writing large files continuously over a long period of time, you are longevity for the flash will diminish much faster.

The larger the SSD the longer the longevity because it has more places to write.

And... BLAH.

I think that the very low response times of SSDs doesn't require superfetch. SSDs are like large RAM disks.