Hybrid Hard disk drive

A hybrid hard disk is one which combines a ordinary hard disk with a new and faster storage medium (typically flash memory) to provide faster access. Until now , the few hybrid HDD’s that were proposed / developed contained an inbuilt small amount of flash memory typically less than 500 Mb, which cached frequently used data to speed up the data access.

SilverStone Technology has introduced a different set of technology, essentially using a HDD instead of using a inbuilt , limited flash memory, called aptly as HDDBOOST. According to company this makes for a 70 % faster than a traditional hard drive.

How it works – The flash memory basically creates a mirror of the hard disk so that all read access can be made to the SSD, and this make it almost 10 times faster than a normal hard disk. However the actual magnetic HDD is still required to store any changes made, and to reduce the number of writes to the SSD.

The best solution I have found so far is to have the whole OS on SSD and all the installations too and just have hard drives to less frequently accessed larger files. There are SSD available that come with a caching software and are of smaller capacity like 32GB etc but any writes would be as slow as your hard drive is so it defeats the whole purpose.