SilverStone’s HDDBoost Combines Your SSD and HDD Together

Over the years, we’ve heard of many products that promised to combine both flash-based and mechanical-based storage together to deliver something amazing, but to the best of my knowledge, no product like this has ever shipped. It could be for a good reason, too, because with the promises of ultra-fast speeds, it makes no sense at all that such products never came to fruition.

But SilverStone has just launched (availability soon) a product that gives people a more hands-on approach to this idea, by allowing you to physically pair up an SSD with an HDD. Once installed, Windows would see a single drive, matching the density of the HDD, but with the SSD at the front-end, the buffer or cache would be massive.

The way it would work is that the data would be actually written to the SSD, and then copied to the HDD. So, the speed would seem be on par with an SSD, but the data would be stored on the HDD. I am not quite sure how the vice versa scenario would work, though. Would data to be read be first copied to the SSD? Of course not, so I’m going to assume that this solution is better suited to provide much improved write speeds.

The “HDDBoost” from SilverStone is due out later this month, for a street price of around ~$45 USD.

In SilverStone’s own words: “During the first mirror backup process, the HDDBoost will ‘mirror’ the front-end data from the HDD to the SSD directly. Defragmenting the HDD first will ensure there is as much data as possible to be copied to the SSD.” Once the SSD has all the priority data from the hard disk, the HDDBoost storage controller sets the data read priority to the SSD, telling Windows to favour the SSD when possible. This makes the storage sub-system as fast as the SSD, but with all the storage space of the hard disk.