The flash memory in the Fusion Drive moves data and applications frequently accessed by the user to the flash memory and move less frequentlyuseddata to the hard disk drive as the flash memory becomes full.
The company has introduced products for this industry before but it appears that the time is right for these products as well as hybrid HDDs (HDDs that contain some cache flash memory for frequentlyuseddata) to become wide-spread in computer architectures.
Using a combination of HDD and flash memory in either a hybrid HDD or a dual storage notebook computer, where frequentlyuseddata (and possibly the operating system and application software) is kept in the flash memory, while the bulk of user content is kept on the HDD, has been shown to provide about 80% of the performance improvements of a pure SSD-based computer.
These approaches can combine a smaller SSD that stores the operating system and applications and a larger HDD that is used for user data, or a hybrid HDD that has flash memory inside a HDD that is used to store frequently accessed data on the flash with less useddata kept available on the HDD.
The flash cache is used to store frequently accessed data providing the fast data response found in solid state drives while the hard disk storage provides low cost storage.
After installing the SSD and software, the SanDisk ReadyCache solution's advanced caching algorithms automatically manage data by caching frequentlyused files to improve overall performance2.