Thursday, February 04, 2010

HDDBOOST Fuses SSDs with HDDs for Speed Made Cheap [PCs]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/UW_y02_eB_A/hddboost-fuses-ssds-with-hdds-for-speed-made-cheap

So, the HDDBOOST may be ridiculously brilliant. It's a hard drive bay that offers SATA connections to both a normal hard drive and a solid state drive. Ultimately, it promises the speeds of SSD with the storage capacity of HDD.

Here's how it works:

With no additional software, a 32GB SSD (recommended size, that you install) mirrors a chunk of data from your HDD, allowing it to act as a high speed data buffer, starting processes quickly while your computer only combs through your slower HDD-based files as necessary.

Of course, everything won't be SSD speed, but manufacturer SilverStone still promises a 150% speed increase across your entire computing experience. That number is a bit hard to swallow, given the fact that there's no intelligent optimization (that we've heard of, at least) guiding HDDBOOST to only copy over the most used, most beneficial files for speed increases. Then again, the idea certainly makes some level sense. And for $55 (available in Japan only at the moment), the HDDBOOST isn't a huge financial risk. [Hexus]