Hybrid SSD (New type of affordable hard disk)

[Smith6612]

Believe it or not this is already possible, there are (though not many) a few implementations of RAM based drives, blazingly fast and a fair amount of space, such a shame about the power dedication though. as soon as power is lost, the information is lost

That reminds me that RAM based drives have been around for ages. I remember two years ago seeing a video on YouTube about someone who modded their PC and got Windows XP to boot up in under 3 seconds. You didn't even see the XP screen long enough to see what it was doing. All you saw was the POST screen, a brief moment of the XP screen and then the desktop showed up.

RAM doesn't need much power to run unless you've got some crazy high clocked RAM.

 

[Sharky]

actually, depending on how much writing is being performed, it could be less. this is because of the oxification process used to store the electrons. the problem is nand flash degrades over time with each erase (again Intel has found a way to extend the life of their ssd drive)

Wouldn't surprise me if they just had a high amount of redundancy there with some sort of inbuilt mechanism for detecting failure... so if certain areas started to degrade, they could be marked as such, and the device could then bring some of the redundant space in to use.