14 DAY TRIAL // Those who wanted a clear-cut method of combining the benefits of both hard disk drives and solid state drives now have it in the form of the OCZ Synapse Cache Series 2.5-inch SSD.
SSD/HDD hybrids are something that were invented, or at least envisioned, almost as soon as solid state drives appeared.
Since then, some solutions that managed to combine, to some extent, the two storage technologies came to be.
There were both storage drives and motherboard-based technologies that could employ a process called caching to have the operating system view an SSD and HDD as a single drive.
It turns out that OCZ invented a solid state drive specifically tailored for these types of setups, bearing the name of Synapse Cache Series.
They are 2.5-inch models with maximum data transfer speeds of 550 MB/s and 490 MB/s (read and write, respectively), plus a 4k random write rate of 75,000 IOPS..
When used with HDDs, they can provide the entirety of the latter's capacity with this performance, thanks to always first copying data on the flash memory and, once that is done, moving it to the HDD as part of a background process.
"The industry has shown that it craves the performance advantages that SSDs provide, however, many users still value the high capacities associated with HDDs,” said Tobias Brinkmann, director of Product Management, OCZ Technology Group.
"We see the Synapse Cache SSDs integrated with Dataplex™ software as a big win for a large number of customers who value SSD performance but still require HDD capacity. We are proud to be the first to offer this no-compromise approach to enabling high-performance and high-capacity storage for virtually any PC platform.”
The Synapse Cache SSDs from OCZ obviously use the SATA III (6 Gbps) interface. Their capacities are of 64 GB to 128 GB, but the prices were not revealed.