Silverstone HDD Boost SSD & Hard Drive Optimizer Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2010-05-08
·
853 words · ~4 min read
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so today is a pretty big day first of all it is the day that I'm going to be
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unboxing a very cool product from Silverstone this is the Silverstone hard
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drive boost or HDD boost and it is also
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an exciting day because it is the last day of the Esther's Easter extravagance
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I'm just going to pick up my camera here and have a look at that Esther's Easter Extravaganza chance to win a basket
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Bonanza sweep Stakes where you have a chance to win a card with uh sorry a
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card a system with a GTX 480 graphics
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card so that is and this is the code word if you're here looking for that a
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fery FM I so without further Ado why don't we
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get started on the HDD boost unboxing so it comes in a fairly simple brown box
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you can see here andh okay yeah it's a
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very simple box easy to install compatible with most 2 and 1 12 in SATA
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ssds minimum SSD data right times help
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extend the SSD life cycle so as you may or may not know SSD is do have a limited
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number of times that you can actually write to the whole disc and then rewrite
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rewrite rewrite over it so while with most modern ssds it's not a huge problem
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they're still saying that yes you know what this will go ahead and it'll reduce
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the number of rights that you're doing so it'll increase the lifetime of the drive great you can boost your original
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system hard drive read speeds without reinstalling your operating system
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that's pretty cool too so create your own Super drive with maximum storage and
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maximum speed so they're basically saying that you get all of the benefit
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of an SSD which is Fast Response times
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with all of the benefit of a hard drive which is inexpensive and high capacity
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so here we are let me see it's nickel it is 1 mm spcc with nickel plating it
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needs 5 volt in from the PC power supply the requirements are fairly simple you
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need to have an SSD and a hard drive so let's get this opened up and have a look
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at what's inside the first thing we're going to see I'm going to go ahead and adjust my camera here I'm in my little
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um video video sort of box so to speak
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all right so let's have a look at this package here first of all we will find
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four regular size hard drive screws and two small ones with what looks like a
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like a smaller threading on them so we got six screws in there the next thing
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we have is a SATA cable with locking connectors all right that looks like a
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6-in cable by the way and then we have the hard drive boost wow that was a very
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simple package okay so inside the hard
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drive Bo boost we will find a place to mount an SSD
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drive yeah we'll find a place to mount an SSD drive so we've got our 2 and 1/2
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in mounting holes here here here
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and we have two that's it two holes okay
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I guess that's what those two small ones are for and then this is actually a 3
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and 1/2 in adapter so you'll use those full sizee screws in order to mount this
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inside your computer so so you can see that the interface on the back this is
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where it gets a little bit more complicated you've got your SATA power
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in then you have SATA data then you have
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another SATA data connector so this one goes to your motherboard and then you
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you will use your existing hard drive cable for that and then you can use this
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additional cable to go out from this guy
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into your hard drive so the chipset on
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here and you can see that this is like a proprietary looking chipset it just says
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uh Silverstone on that chip itself so we have no way of knowing what's in there
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is what does the logic that allows your
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HDD boost to know whether it should write any particular piece of data to
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the SSD or the hard drive and where to read it from so basically the HDD boost
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is a way of treating an SSD kind of like a giant cache it's kind of like RAM is
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except sort of one tier down so you got your CPU then your CPU cache then your
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RAM then your SSD and then your hard drive so it's one step faster to get the
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data off here than it is to get it off of the hard drive that's connected to it
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so thanks for watching my unboxing of the HDD boost and uh thank you for
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everyone who participated in the Easter
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extravaganza