For purposes of this review I decided to use four tests and a slightly different test system than we normally use for testing HDDs. The point of this device is to add a single HDD to a SSD to improve performance so I used the old standby WD Raptor 74GB with Windows 7 installed and a GIGABYTE 870A-UD3 motherboard for testing. One set of tests was done with the WD drive, one with the ADATA drive by itself and finally with both running HDDBOOST. In general terms the HDDBOOST device increases performance over the WD Raptor 74GB almost to the same speed as the ADATA SSD drive by itself for read speeds and better performance for write speeds. I could have used a 256GB or 512GB drive for the test but the 32GB drive is the least expensive on the market and perfect for this type of test. The SilverStone drive operates much like a RAID controller without two identical drives. Looking at the graphed test results it is clear where the extra performance is. The first part of the graph shows high performance from the SSD drive with sustained lower performance where the HDD kicks in. It leads to better overall performance.
Test System
- AMD Phenom II 1090T running at 3.2GHz
- 4GB Kingston DDR3-1866MHz memory running at 1333MHz
- WD Raptor 10000RPM 74GB HDD
- ADATA S592 32GB SSD drive
- Windows 7
- ATI RADEON HD 4870 running Catalyst 10.5
Test Software
- CrystalDiskMark
- HDTach Read test
- HD Tune
- Sisoft Sandra 2010 HDD Benchmark
| Test | ADATA 32GB S592 Drive | WD 74GB Raptor | HDDBoost | >
| Crystaldiskmark | | | | >
| Seq read MB/s | 155.5 | 83.3 | 144.5 | >
| Seq write MB/s | 63.7 | 82.7 | 83.63 | >
| 512K Read MB/s | 123 | 30.3 | 124 | >
| 512k write MB/s | 32.22 | 44.53 | 26.08 | >
| 4k read MB/s | 23.25 | 0.75 | 13.26 | >
| 4k write MB/s | 4.936 | 1.516 | 1.512 | >
| HD Tach | | | | >
| random access time ms | 0.1 | 8.2 | 4.4 | >
| CPU utilization | 5% | 3% | 3% | >
| Average read MB/s | 155 | 76.8 | 103.5 | >
| HD Tune | | | | >
| minimum MB/s | 118.5 | 41.1 | 45.9 | >
| maximum MB/s | 165.2 | 83.8 | 156.9 | >
| Average read MB/s | 146 | 71.3 | 99.5 | >
| Sisoft sandra | | | | >
| Drive index MB/s | 165.39 | 71.81 | 105.8 | >
| random access | 0.05 | 8.24 | 3.83 | >
