Silverstone HDDBOOST – Hybrid SSD/HDD solution Written on February 3, 2010, by Scott.
Bit-tech.net posted an interesting article Silverstone’s new “hybrid” HDD product called HDDBOOST. HDDBOOST pitch is “Create your own superdrive with maximum storage and maximum speed”. It promises to give your system the benefits of an SSD without having to reinstall your operating system. The system consists of a 3.5″ caddy with a SATA controller chip in which you install the new SSD. You then connect the caddy between your HDD and the motherboard’s SATA controller. HDDBOOST then uses the SSD as a cache infront of your HDD thus giving you full access to your HDD’s storage capacity, while allowing you to benefit from your SSD’s speed and all this for 33Euro (~$46). Sounds great in theory, but as you can guess the caching scheme will determin wether this product delivers what it promises.
I took a quick peak at the product manual which you can download from here to see if I could find more information how it works. Basically HDDBOOST copies your HDD’s “front-end data” to the SSD during boot-up. After boot the controller checks each read request to see if the data is on the SSD. If yes you benefit from the faster SSD reads. If not the data will be loaded from the HDD. The system does not use write caching at all which ensure data consistency incase the power failure and should increases SSD endurance, since writes are limited to the mirroring done during boot-up.
The negative side of this approach is that you do not take advantage of the faster write performance of modern SSDs and that caching is limited to when you reboot, so if your like me and hardly ever shutdown your computer you’re cache hit rate might go down significantly to the point where your reading from the HDD the majority of the time. Thankfully Silverstone provides a monitoring utility with which you can manual trigger a synch as well as update the SATA controllers firmware. Another potential problem is hinted in the manual where it recommends that you defragment your drive first before you install HDDBOOST. I’m guessing the mirroring algorythm might not be very smart at all and “front-end data” literally means the initial sectors of your HDD. That puts the quality of the read caching into the hands of your defragmenting software. You are also looking at an additional delay during boot while the mirroring takes place. Another potential problem is the size of your SSD cache. If it is too small the mirrored data will be updated frequently and thus impacting your cache hit rate. Here is the block diagram of how HDDBOOST works. Finally I wonder if SSD TRIM will work at all since you do not have access to the SSD directly and the controller’s speed is limited to 3Gbps SATA and thus will not be able to take advantage of the newer 6Gbps drives that will start coming out this month.
While the idea sounds great, there are too many potential problems of the implementation. I can’t see myself using this product or recommending it to someone else, because of the lacking write caching. If I had a new SSD drive I would use it as my primary drive and do a fresh Windows 7 install on it and use just for the OS and programs. Thus you would get the benefit of both read and write acceleration and have native TRIM support. With a BIOS that support boot drive selection, you can dual boot between your old HDD and the SSD till you have migrated all your programs to the SSD. In both cases you would have access to all your data since the HDD would appear as a second drive in Windows. Without a long term test data of the product there is no way to really quantify the benefit of this product. Amazing what you can gather from a manual. 
PROS:
- No OS reinstall
- Easy entry into SSD technology for non-techy folks
- Potentially less writes to the SSD and longer endurance / drive life
CONS:
- No WRITE CACHING.
- Only SATA 3Gbps supported. No SATA 6Gbps.
- Data-mirroring caching scheme which makes read acceleration dependent on the availability of mirrored data.
- Data mirrored only at boot-up. Boot delay to copy HDD data to SSD.
- Unclear how well “front-end data” mirroring will work.
- No direct access to the SSD so TRIM support is disabled.
Check out the bit-tech.net article here and visit the Silverstone product page to view the neat Flash animation for HDDBOOST.
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