14 DAY TRIAL // Solid state drives have been seeing an increased adoption over the past year, but hard drives are still more widespread because of their lower prices and overall higher storage capabilities. While upgrading from HDD to SSD is rather costly, Lenovo has been working on a way to pool the resources of a hard drive unit and an SSD unit. Demonstrated at the 2010 international Consumer Electronics Show, the RapidDrive is actually a technology that combines a PCI-Express SSD and a regular hard drive.
Lenovo is offering the RapidDrive as part of its IdeaPad Y460 and Y560 laptops that are scheduled for release in March. According to the company, the technology utilizes a more automatic algorithm than the Intel TurboMemory and dynamically pools and manages the hybrid drive, enabling Windows 7 boot speeds as well as overall performance improvements of 66 percent.
“When you buy a Lenovo Y560 or Y460, you will have the option to configure it with RapidDrive. Your machine will have your standard hard disk drive plus a 32GB or 64GB SSD installed in the internal PCI-E slot. The breakthrough is not combining the two in one system. Anyone can do that. The breakthrough is using a Lenovo patent-pending technology that connects both the SSD and HDD simultaneously as one big, contiguous drive,” a post on Lenovo Blogs said.
“This storage is dynamically pooled and managed. The end user does not need to do anything. The system manages the SSD depending on usage. Programs, documents, and other files are dynamically moved on and off of the SSD so that you can always get the fastest speed possible.”
“This is not Intel TurboMemory. TurboMemory required more user intervention to manage on a regular basis. Our technology not only offers more capacity, but is more automatic,” the post added.
The IdeaPad Y460 and Y560 will be configurable with combinations between the aforementioned 32GB and 64GB PCI-Express SSDs and hard drives of up to 500GB. More information may be found in an official interview on Lenovo's website.