For a moment the traditional manufacturers of hard drives thought of making hybrid hard drives containing, in addition to the platters for storage, some flash memory which could be used as a buffer and thus accelerate reading and writing. The idea was quickly abandoned, the cost of the FLASH forcing them to use only a small quantity that nevertheless increased the price of the discs without bringing significant real performances. It was in the same way for the experiments of Intel and of Microsoft to manage memory flash to make a cache disc. Since we now have the choice, that is to say the SSD, with its speed but high price and low capacity or the hard drive, unbeatable in terms of the ratio of capacity to price, but quite insipid in performances when one has tasted the SSD. The SilverStone company tries ressusciter this concept by releasing a product.
The unit functions by connecting a SSD on the SATA interface between the computer and the traditional hard drive. It becomes then a comfortable buffer (according to its size), several tens of GB and manages the writings deferred writing onto the hard drive. It would of course be necessary to test the solution to know the real performances, but they could prove interesting if the algorithms of management of the readings and writings are rather powerful and predictive.
PS: This type of solution will be very difficult to set up in Mac that does not have eSATA, two positions for the hard drive, or in the drawers of Mac Pro that prevents any originality in the connection of the hard drives.
