IcyDock SSD Xpander (SSD Hybrid) Review

1. Introduction2. IcyDock SSD Xpander3. Setting up two drives4. Testing Methodology5. CrystalDiskMark6. HD Tach 3.0.4.0.7. ATTO Disk Benchmark8. PCMark Vantage9. PCMark 710. Real World Testing11. Closing Thoughts12. View All Pages

IcyDock have been releasing many cool adapters and gadgets recently, and today we are looking at the SSD Xpander, a device that allows the user to combine a Solid State Drive with a mechanical drive.

Icydock say that this is the ‘perfect upgrade solution' for those users who don't want to purchase a high capacity SSD. Using new hybrid algorithms the product can combine an SSD drive with a mechanical drive to create a ‘hybrid' partition with a ‘storage' partition.

The device is said to double the sequential transfer rates of the HDD exclusively in the hybrid partition. We will look into performance characteristics later in the review.

Model Number : MB882HX-1SB

Color : Black

Drive Fit : 2.5″ SATA II SSD

Compatible drive type : 3.5″ SATA II hard drive

Device Fit : 3.5″ SATA drive bay

Host Interface : SATA

Structure : Plastic

Dimension (L x W x H) : 146.6 x 101.6 x 25.4mm

Weight : 125g

The IcyDock SSD Xpander arrives in a plain box with an image of the product, resting on top of a 3.5 inch mechanical drive underneath. The device only supports the SATA II 3Gbps interface.

The bundle is very simple, with the chassis itself supplied with an instruction manual. Some of the components are shipped inside the chassis.

The top tray slides out from the chassis allowing the Solid State Drive to be fitted. Inside the case is a SATA cable and a set of mounting screws.

Inside, is the IcyDock branded controller card which has a direct connection for a 2.5 inch drive and an outward Sata port for connecting the larger 3.5 inch mechanical drive.

Installing a solid state drive is a straightforward process. Simply slide the drive into the connector and reseal the chassis by sliding in the outer door. The process takes a couple of seconds.

With the Solid State drive installed internally, the rest of the install procedure is logical. The 3.5 inch mechanical drive works in conjunction with the SSD and needs connected into the same controller card.

The Xpander controller card has a SATA header offset to the right, using the supplied SATA cable, this attaches to the 3.5 inch mechanical drive as seen above. Both 2.5 inch SSD and 3.5 inch drive are then fed power via two sata power connectors from the power supply.

When the drive is correctly installed, as seen in the image above, it will be identified as the ‘ICY DOCK SSD Xpander'. It is worth checking this before proceeding further.

When the system boots up for the first time, Windows 7 shows a device drive install with the name of the product highlighted.

Both partitions are automatically configured as we can see by checking diskmgmt.msc.

Icydock explain ‘SSD Xpander combines 3.5 inch HDD capacity with SSD Performance. It automatically creates two partitions, one is double the SSD capacity and the second partition will be the size of the 3.5 inch HDD minus double the capacity of the SSD.'

We used a 250 GB Intel 510 SSD Drive and a 1TB Samsung HDD for this configuration and the image shows how the product configured the drives. Partition 1 (D), which is the ‘performance hybrid' installation is set to RAW mode and it needs formatted – this is half the size of the total capacity of the mechanical drive. The secondary partition (E) is unallocated by default, so a quick format is needed.

For testing, we try to use free programs and some real world testing so you can compare our findings against your own system.

While many people will be using the XPander with a smaller 40GB SSD drive combined with a larger mechanical drive, we wanted to measure ultimate throughput performance and opted for a SATA 3 Intel 510 drive with a fast 7,200 rpm 1TB Samsung hard drive (HD103SJ).

CPU: Intel Core i7 2600k
Cooler: Thermaltake Frio OCK
Motherboard: Asus P8P67 Deluxe
Memory: ADATA DDR3 2000mhz 9-11-9-24
PSU: ADATA 1200W
Graphics: Sapphire HD6950 Flex Edition
Chassis: Thermaltake Level 10 GT
Operating System: Windows 7 64 bit Ultimate
Monitor: Dell U2410

Software:
Atto Disk Benchmark
HD Tach
CrystalMark
PCMark Vantage
PCMark 7
SiSoft Sandra
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call Of Pripyat

All our results were achieved by running each test five times with every configuration this ensures that any glitches are removed from the results. Trim is confirmed as running by typing fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify into the command line. A response of disabledeletenotify =0 confirms TRIM is active.

Crystalmark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V3.0 x64.

With both drives combined performance improves from 144.9 MB/s seq read and 140.2MB/s seq write to 219.7 MB/s seq read and 202.1 MB/s seq write. 512k write performance receives a substantial performance boost, increasing from 67.55 MB/s to 106.6MB/s. 4k performance is hampered by the mechanical drive.

I have been using HDTach for many years now and always find it is an invaluable benchmark to ascertain potential levels of performance. HD Tach is a low level hardware benchmark for random access read/write storage devices such as hard drives, removable drives (ZIP/JAZZ), flash devices, and RAID arrays.

HD Tach uses custom device drivers and other low level Windows interfaces to bypass as many layers of software as possible and get as close to the physical performance of the device possible.

We tested using the Long Bench.

Interestingly however, HD Tach would only test the complete drive, across both D and E partitions as seen in the image above.

As HD Tach reads the whole physical disk, rather than just the partitioned D: and E: sections, the graph takes a performance dive once it reaches the 500GB mark in the middle of the raid setup (above right). This significantly lowers the overall average result.

The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.

Performance is boosted by around 60-70 MB/s in both read and write tests.

We use Futuremark’s PCMark Vantage in many of our system reviews and we felt that it was worth an inclusion in this review. It is still a synthetic suite, but it uses many real world characteristics to try and judge overall performance levels. We are using the 64 bit version of the HDD Suite for this testing. We also compare against a Samsung F1 1TB drive on this page.

A PCMark score is a measure of your computer’s performance across a variety of common tasks such as viewing and editing photos, video, music and other media, gaming, communications, productivity and security. From desktops and laptops to workstations and gaming rigs, by comparing your PCMark Vantage score with other similar systems you can find the hardware and software bottlenecks that stop you getting more from your PC.

The overall score increases from 5,150 points to 5,968 points when using the XPander with SSD & HDD combined.

PCMark 7 is the latest benchmark suite from Futuremark and it includes 7 separate test suites combining more than 20 individual workloads covering storage, computation, image and video manipulation, web browsing and gaming.

Slight gains from the Xpander, more noticeable with the secondary suite of tests.

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.

The IcyDock SSD Xpander is an interesting and rather unique design which may prove useful to a narrow audience using a very small 30GB or 40GB SSD. This product means they can expand the size of their boot configuration by pairing up with a large mechanical drive.

The build quality of the IcyDock XPander is without question, and it worked flawlessly out of the box for us without any problems and no drivers or software installation is required. We also feel the manual is much better than the last product we looked at, which suffered from a complete lack of literature.

In reality however we can't help but feel that IcyDock might be making a product that very few people will want. While we appreciate that a small portion of the enthusiast audience may be working with a small 30 or 40 GB SSD, we aren't sure that anyone will want to reduce overall flash drive performance.

Why?

Well, when we factor in the XPander price point of £38 inc vat, we see that this is basically 40 percent of the cost of a new 64GB Crucial RealSSD M4. In our experience a 64GB drive is more than enough for a Windows 7 operating system install, including applications such as Office and Adobe suite. If you already have a large 1TB hard drive, then storage demands are already sorted.

If you shop around, a 80GB Intel SSD can be purchased for £110 inc vat … or £70 if you factor in the cost of the Xpander which you may be contemplating. A 30GB or 40GB SSD could be sold online for £30 second hand, reducing this price even further.

While we have seen in this review that the performance paired with a quality SSD improves overall mechanical drive throughput, we also need to factor in in that a 7,200 rpm hard drive slows down the overall performance of even an entry level SSD.

It is a fascinating concept and we applaud IcyDock for trying new and inventive ideas, but in this case we really wonder if an enthusiast user will want to limit SSD performance by pairing it up with a mechanical drive. The best option in my opinion is to sell the tiny SSD, save the £40 cost of the Xpander and put it towards a slightly bigger solid state boot drive. This means you can still use your large mechanical drive for storage, but you will be getting the full performance of the solid state unit as a boot drive.

Pros:

• Creative thinking
• well built
• flawless operation in Windows 7

Cons:

• Money could be put towards a bigger SSD
• Slows down SSD performance.
• No support for SATA III 6Gbps interface.

Kitguru says: Unless this is something you specifically need, its better selling your small SSD and putting the cost of the Xpander into buying a 64GB (£90) or 80GB SSD (£110) then using your current mechanical drive for dedicated storage.

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