SilverStone HDDBOOST

Written by Michael Larabel in Storage on 23 April 2010 at 03:11 PM EDT. Page 3 of 4. 6 Comments.

After installing an OCZ Agility solid-state drive and a Seagate Serial ATA 2.0 hard drive we first connected the SST-HDDBOOST setup to an AMD Opteron 2384 quad-core workstation with a Tyan Thunder n3600B motherboard. The SST-HDDBOOST with its connected drive was not detected at all by the BIOS regardless of the SATA mode settings thus we could not boot to the drive and was also not detected by the Ubuntu installer. Next, we connected the drive to an AMD Phenom II system, where fortunately it was detected.

The HDDBOOST will work with Linux, *BSD, and any other operating systems according to SilverStone, but the firmware updating and monitoring utility for the device is limited to only Windows. Fortunately, the firmware was updated on our review sample prior to it shipping. While the HDDBOOST began working when installed in the second system, it was not an immediately pleasant experience, and there were not any performance gains to note.

After using the SST-HDDBOOST for a while, we began receiving pop-up messages from GNOME's Disk Utility notification daemon that "A hard disk may be failing. One or more hard disks report health problems. Click the icon to get more information." Within the GNOME Disk Utility it then reported S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) problems. The SST-HDDBOOST was reporting that the "DISK IS BEING USED OUTSIDE DESIGN PARAMETERS." The disk though continued to function fine, at least on the end-user side. SilverStone reports that S.M.A.R.T. is not supported by the SST-HDDBOOST and the drives should be safe.


Related Articles