14 DAY TRIAL // Combining the assets of both HDDs and SSDs has been a veritable dream for many months, and it seems that something of the sort has now become possible, courtesy of Marvell.
While some so-called hybrid drives, which have both HDD platters and flash chips, exist, they are few and not exactly popular.
Still, the dream for SSD speed and HDD capacity persists, and Marvell might have just struck a gold mine.
Basically, the company created the 88SE9130 SATA 6.0 Gbps controller which features the possibly game-changing HyperDuo technology.
What this asset does is use so-called intelligent algorithms to determine hot data files and place them on a SATA solid state drive.
This will let them be very easily accessible, while the rest of the data is safely stored on whatever HDD the PC happens to be equipped with.
All in all, tests have supposedly shown that 80% of the performance of a SATA SSD is achieved when storing all data to a HDD.
"Our leadership in SATA technology products is reaffirmed with milestones like today's launch of the 88SE9130 SATA controller powered by HyperDuo,”said Alan Armstrong, Vice President of Marketing for the Storage Business Group at Marvell Semiconductor.
“Through close integration with our partners, the 88SE9130 enables industry-leading performance levels at ultra-low product and energy costs," he added.
"Consumer technologies like those shown at CES 2011 desperately need innovations like HyperDuo 6Gb/s SATA controllers to continue meeting and exceeding customer demand, and Marvell is thrilled to be leading the industry with our SSD acceleration technology," Armstrong went on to saying.
The Safe mode mirrors data on the SSD for 'maximum resiliency', while a Capacity mode lets the HDD store most of the files. Regardless, the OS will show the dual-drive setup as a single partition.
Motherboards equipped with the chip should soon be launched by ASRock, Gigabyte, ASUS and MSI, among others.