14 DAY TRIAL // Hardware makers are always on the lookout for ways to improve storage, especially seeking to somehow boost the data speeds of hard drives that, though more reliable and capacious than solid state drives, are significantly slower. While there are a variety of programs that seek to improve the overall storage performance, they are still limited by the actual capabilities of the hardware. To remove, or at least expand, those hardware limits, SilverStone has come up with a sleek device that increases the storage speed through combining a hard disk and an SSD.
Hybrid drives have already been experimented with and Lenovo has already revealed an HDD-PCI Express SSD hybrid. The RapidDrive technology was described as being able to combine a PCI Express SSD and an HDD into a single contiguous device. It has a performance increase of about 66% and will be used in select Lenovo laptops. SilverStone's device, dubbed HDDBOOST, is aimed at desktops and is able to merge any 3.5-inch SATA HDD with a 2.5-inch SSD. This combination will allow for an overall storage speed boost of about 70% without any need for software or drivers.
The product achieves its goal by creating a mirror of front-end data of the hard drive on the solid state drive. As such, files that are commonly used will be read from the latter, for access times of under 1ms. Normal hard-drive access times can be over ten times slower. In addition, the HDDBOOST will only store the initial mirror data on the SSD, putting the rest on the HDD. While this still means that most of the data will continue to be read from the hard disk, the procedure will reduce the amounts of writes done to the SSD.
Although already selling, HDDBOOST is, currently, only available in Japan for the price of roughly 37 Euro. Still, the company intends to make the device available in Europe sometime later this month. Information may be found on the official product page.