PERFORMANCE

HDDBoost Bay

Our testbed consisted of an AMD Phenom II X4 955BE processor, Gigabyte GA-890FXA-UD7 motherboard, 4GB of Corsair DDR3 memory, Radeon HD 5850 videocard, Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB hard drive, and a Kingston 64GB SSD.

We ran the HDDBoost through a series of synthetic and real-world benchmarks, with particular emphasis placed on storage performance.

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We kicked things off by running the ATTO Disk Benchmark and compared all three configurations (HDD, SSD, and HDDBoost). Going into this, we expected the HDDBoost to perform somewhere in between an SSD and HDD, and that's exactly what we got. For the most part, the HDDBoost put up numbers closer to the HDD than the SSD. It's also interesting to note that the HDDBoost inherited the SSD's write performance hit - the standalone HDD posted faster reads than either of the other two setups.

	SSD	HDD	HDDBoost
Startup (seconds)	35	46	38.5
Everest Random Read (MB/s)	281.9	94	160.2
Everest Burst Read (MB/s)	204.1	418.1	198.2
CrystalDiskMark Seq. Read (MB/s)	240.3	184.2	222.6
CrystalDiskMark Seq. Write (MB/s)	89.62	122.7	83.06
HD Tach Avg. Read (MB/s)	132	108.3	116.5
HD Tach CPU Utilization	10%	8%	2%
HD Tach Random Access	0.3	12.4	11.7
HD Tune Pro Read (MB/s)	189	98.5	110.6
HD Tune Pro Burst (MB/s)	98.2	231.9	193
Resident Evil 5 (FPS)	79.7	78.9	81.1
PCMark Vantage (Overall)	11,424	8,241	8,538

What we saw with the ATTO benchmark was mirrored throughout the bulk of our testing. The HDDBoost generally outpaced our standalone HDD, while at the same time taking on the few deficiencies of the standalone SSD. In burst read tests, for example, our standalone mechanical hard drive trumped both other setups. At the same time, the HDDBoost showed marked improvement in some areas, such as pulling in 160.2MB/s random reads in Everest compared to 94MB/s for the hard drive, living up to SilverStone's claims of up to a 70 percent performance boost.

BURNED iN Conclusion

Given the current state of SSDs (high price, low capacity), SilverStone's HDDBoost is certainly a compelling concept, and the short of it is the device lived up to its billing, at least for the most part. Except in the few cases where a standalone hard drive trumps an SSD, the HDDBoost improved performance over running a hard drive by itself. It wasn't always dramatic, but it was faster.

The obvious question here is wouldn't it be better to just install the OS on your SSD and use the HDD as secondary storage? The answer is 'yes,' with a caveat. Unless you splurged on a high-capacity SSD (or two of them in a RAID 0 array), you're going to run out of space faster than LeBron James ran out of supporters living in Cleveland (go Celtics), and once you begin installing programs on your hard drive, the speed benefits of that pricey SSD take a back seat. In this case, the HDDBoost becomes a compelling option.

We still prefer the idea of a standalone SSD, but hey, the HDDBoost does what it's supposed to and it doesn't cost a whole lot to boot. Whether or not it's worth it will depend on your specific storage setup.

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