SilverStone Device Gives 70% HDD Boost

REVIEWS PLZ KTHXBAI!

This an odd piece of tech for sure, I'd love to hear about it in more detail.

I don't really see the point. It's the same thing as having a really large cache on a hard drive. You have to pay $50 for this device, plus buy an SSD. You'd be better off just having a separate SSD for boot and a good ole mechanical drive for storage.

Um no. Either stay with regular or go to SSD.
Don't waste $50. Now if it was $10 or $20...

I do believe you mean Fry's.

Yep, seems only a valid option if you *really* don't want to reinstall the OS.
Otherwise, as mentioned in the article, use the ssd directly.
And what would be the $ and performance comparison if you just added a new drive and run on Raid0 (most motherboards have on-board Raid0)

So it's just Windows & ReadyBoost?

Is this the same as having more memory and using a RamDrive, albeit with less space compared to SSD's today?

If This Would decrease the degrading of the SSDs drives, Then maybe a lot of people will consider it.

I don't really understand... why 2 satas ports ?
This is backup propose or performance propose ?

I feel like more cache memory on HD cache could give same or better result...

It seems they're only catering to the market of people who REALLY don't want to reinstall their OS... doesn't make sense to me. IMO, the reinstallation of the OS is one of the benefits of going through an HDD/SDD upgrade. For those people who don't reinstall on a somewhat regular basis, the process of going back to a unmodified OS and putting on just the essentials can be as much of a boost in performance as this new piece of technology claims to achieve anyway.

I appreciate the idea, if it worked as advertised. If only the OS ran quicker, then yes, have a boot drive and storage drive. But if it actually helps the storage drive load 70% faster on everything, then that's great, and keeps the SSD alive longer.

...

So its what RAM is supposed to be....

Oh, you have hundreds of gigs of non-volative RAM? What kind, ferro mem, or one of those other unreleased technologies? Or maybe you have 10 battery-backed RAM drives installed and hooked to a big UPS?

WTF is an SDD?

Come on guys, its not hard to skim an article half a page long.

Very true. The writing as a whole is sloppy. For example:
"the device itself is mounted within a 3.5-inch drive bay which in turn houses an SSD."

It sounds like Mr. Parrish is saying that the 3.5" drive bay houses both the device AND an SSD (If this were true, I would say, "Congratulations on making the device compact. But wouldn't it look kind of messy?"). I think what he was trying to say was this:

"The device, which houses an SSD, is mounted within a 3.5-inch drive bay."

can i really buy one at circuit city?

can i really get one at circuit city? really?

Yes. Circuit City is an e-tailer now.

Circuit City? That's right! Somebody bought the rights to the name.

So does anyone else remember that Samsung tried this awhile ago with their Hybrid Drive technology? No? Guess that shows how well it worked out the first time around.

Like hybrid cars, its a good idea on paper, but the required time and effort to perfect the technology should really be used to come up with a replacement for magnetic media, not a complicated go-between.

if you can get some cheap 16 or 32 gig ssd's and slap it on and hdd with a cheaper hybrid drive then this would be great for high storage, not booting.

Anyone ever heard of drive imaging software? This SilverStone product is only for suckers.

Sounds like this device acts like a semi permanent cache. If it can store files that are read alot on it, it would be a winner, but not for 50$. So, the OS files that are read the most often, the game that you launch most often, would be stored on this device seamlessly. Next time you boot, it's still there (unlike a RAM substitute) and you'll boot up quickly and launch your game quickly, everytime.

A true RAM cache or HDD cache doesn't work this way as it still has to read it off the HDD every time to store it in the cache for use.

A ton of nay-sayers but they're missing the point of the product, give performance boost to your existing setup, no need to purchase a new HD and copy the thing. As far as I can tell the SSD is already built in (but it never mentions the density, 1GB, 2GB, 4GB???). The USB connector is used for firmware updates, it's NOT for plugging in a thumbdrive SSD.

I'm excited to see real world benchmarks of the device in action to see what kind of speed it offers, I never trust 1st party claims.

Available in US as of 2/18/10, according to Joel at SilverStone US HQ in CA.

Hmmm.... im not sure desktop really need this, althoguh i do see it much more potential for this product to be in a laptop were power saving, performance, and storage is much tighter than a desktops.

Could be just me.

Cant wait for some benches though.

you lot really can't see the point of this?
Say you need a lot of files stored (say 2tb), but you only access most of them infrequently. This will substancially increase those files which are accessed frequently. I can see this being extremely useful for a web server.

i really wish if they could compressed the SSD and HDD in one 2.5form because i guess this is more ideal for netbooks and notebooks who does not want to carry around an external HDD. just imagine the capability of faster seek, read and write and the storage for example of 1tb inside your little laptop. i mean 1tb of SSD is really a mind blowing price to have. i wish they would push this technology faster.

but i really disagree with this idea. i can't buy this stuff for my desktop because desktop boards houses mostly 6 sata nowadays. u can always just put a 1tb to 2 tb of HDD in one of the sata then put a decent 32gb SSD in another sata to store the OS and APPS for faster performance. this gadget would be a redundant and is an additional cost.

This makes some sense to me. You can use a cheaper smaller ssd like the Intel 40gig X25-v to cache the frequently used files. I'll bet a 40gig cache that's already loaded at startup time (unlike a ram cache) would greatly improve the performance of most computers. 40 gigs could probably cache 75% of our daily programs - yet we wouldn't be limited to the small size of the ssd.
Buy us some time until a cheaper more powerful 250 or 500 gig ssd comes along.

The main appeal this device holds for me is that since it only writes to the SSD during manual sync or reboots, it doesn't need TRIM or a garbage collection utility. I purchased a Kingston 64GB SSD back in September (after neglecting to perform proper research) and found out it had neither TRIM support nor any garbage collection utility and no future plans to supply them. I think this might be just what the doctor ordered. I'll never buy another Kingston "anything," but I thank Silverstone for allowing me to use my SSD after all.

Love this product!
My windows 7 boots in 15seconds, and my HDDboost has a Kingston now 128GB strapped to a 1TB Western Digital black drive. My Adobe apps and other stuff runs in a few seconds. No software or drivers needed.
The only thing you need to do is defrag once in while to make sure your apps and system files are placed near the front of the drive.
I usage Asulogic Disk Drag with Optimize to do this.