IcyDock SSD Xpander (SSD Hybrid) Review

It doesn’t matter how good any of the synthetic suites are, the real meat of the testing has to be under absolute real world conditions. This proves difficult as to record results we have to narrow down fluctuation. Therefore while we would say these are the most useful results to get from this review, there is always going to be a slight margin for error – its not absolutely scientific.

Firstly we installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit Edition onto each of the drives and performed a clean update from Microsoft with all patches and security fixes. We then install a basic suite of software, such as Office, Firefox and Adobe Design, then we install AVG free antivirus. We used a digital watch for this startup and repeated the test five times for each drive – once we had these five results we averaged the results and took that for the final figure.

Start up time is reduced by 19 seconds when using the XPander and Intel SSD. While this is much faster than the mechanical drive alone, it is significantly slower than the SSD on its own.

The HDD takes 36 seconds to load the intensive level we use for this section of the review. When the drive is paired with the SSD, the time is reduced to 28 seconds.

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