[Charles P. Jefferies]

SilverStone today announced HDDBoost, a device that pairs a hard drive and a Solid State Disk (SSD) to provide users the best of both worlds.

http://www.storagere..._ssd_hdd_device

[Brian]

I don't really know if this works, we'll try to get one in for testing, but conceptually, I love it.

[Trinary]

Sorry, but I don't see the point.

What extra value is this supposed to provide compared to connecting the SSD drive and using an imaging tool to migrate the data?

Imaging tools, such as Acronis, cost about the same, but also offer you the ability to resize partitions while performing the migration. In addition, you get extra flexibility compared to this product. This seems more like a "one trick pony" to me.

In my opinion, this would be a much more interesting product if the SSD acted like a giant cache for the HDD rather than simply copying all data, especially if you threw in the ability to control whether the SSD cached reads, writes, or both, and perhaps allowed some control over the caching scheme.

[Brian]

It does act like w giant cache for the HDD.

Quote

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.

After that it sets the read priority to the SSD. They claim a 70% performance increase, but we'll see.

[Trinary]

Brian, on 05 February 2010 - 02:13 PM, said:

It does act like w giant cache for the HDD.



After that it sets the read priority to the SSD. They claim a 70% performance increase, but we'll see.

Well, yes and no.

From the product literature, the assumption seems to be that the SSD is the same size as the HDD. If that's not the case, then what happens?

Do you have any control over what data is copied to the HDD? Can you control whether the SSD only caches reads, writes, or either? Can you adjust the cache policy to more closely suit your application requirements? From what I read, the answer was "No", because the product automatically copies the HDD to the SSD and then redirects all reads and writes to the SSD, bypassing the HDD entirely.

My previous point was that I don't see any added value to using this product versus purchasing imaging software and a SSD separately, and it seems to me that you get more flexibility when purchasing separately.

What's the point of using this versus imaging the SSD with the data from the HDD? Using standard imaging tools, your HDD would be available to be redeployed after imaging. With this, it's not.

I don't think I'm being unduly critical here. I just honestly don't see the value proposition for this product. If you feel differently, please feel free to point out what you think I'm missing/overlooking.

[Brian]

You have a lot of valid questions, I guess the point is, we don't know yet, however, if their software and hardware combo plays some fun tricks to pull it off, then that could be compelling given the marginal cost of the device. I don't see any benefit however, if it can't support a HDD that's larger than the SSD. Getting another 128GB of storage on an HDD for instance doesn't do anything for me.

[Spod]

This only makes sense if it caches the most frequently requested data from the HDD onto a smaller SSD. Otherwise you could just use the SSD for everything and forget the HDD.