A hybrid is a great way to keep costs down, while boosting performance. While I agree 16 gigs is too small, you can always opt for the SSD option for more $$$.
IMO, the hybrid approach is all about trying to boost performance without incurring a "boost" in product price.
Well 8-16GB or storage could easily fit on the motherboard itself. But I dont get the point to making it only fit OS X. If only the OS gets the speed bump I don't see the use in it unless it acts like the Seagate hybrid drive where it can also cache other applications to to help boost their performance too.
It is a question of where it will make the most good. If we apply the Pareto Principle (80%-20% rule), we'll figuratively get 80% of the benefit from the first 20% of our files being accessed.
Nice idea in theory but it's not enough space...
Any chance the boot drive listed is the minimum system and can be expanded to a larger drive?
Consider ...
Step 1: Logically combine the SSD+HD into a
JBOD;
Step 2: Have an OS background application that keeps track of what files are used the most often (ie, would benefit the most from SSD acceleration);
Step 3: Update the OS's background "Defrag"-esque housekeeping utility so that the files from Step#2 are automatically rewritten onto the SSD portion of the JBOD, thereby gaining the optimal speed-up.
Step 4: Enjoy.
Software Update will not recognize applications outside of the Applications folders on the partition with the OS and therefore not find updates...(example: I don't think iTunes has a way of getting a music library off an external drive without tweaking some settings and such. Same story with iPhoto for another example.) If they are able to combine the drives behind the scenes without the user having to deal with it directly, this could work, but I don't think there's anything in the OS to do that yet.
Agreed, but much of this appears to be technologically trivial because it is disk structure organizational logic. All we've done is to identify already known areas where a JBOD-based structure would need to be tested to make sure that it works cleanly.
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Tell me why are people excited about this? I expect 128GB SSDs even in the base 13". I have 16GB in my iPhone, and even that feels like too little.
It has the potential to increase performance without a big increase in cost.
SSD + HD combo would consume more power than just a single HD.
True, if the two weren't interrelated. In simple form, there's three power consumption states of interest for the HD: Accessing, Ready & Sleeping. If the power consumption difference of (Accessing - Ready) is more than the power cost of the SSD access, then there will be a net power savings by this hybrid approach.
Even if there's not a power savings at this level, there's also the rest of the system's power consumption, such as the backlighting on the LCD display: if the SSD allows the response time to become 0.75 sec faster and that improves user productivity by 0.5 sec ... then (at least in theory), there's also 0.5 sec worth of LCD backlighting energy that is "Saved" too, since the operator can finish his tasks sooner.
I hope this is true, because this is EXACTLY what I've been waiting for. It makes complete sense to keep the operating system separate from the userland files.
It is a good idea which has has been suggested
before.
-hh
