If you missed the rather subtle announcement at CES, Lenovo is debuting a new feature on their IdeaPad Y560 and Y460 models. Dubbed ReadyDrive, this technology combines SSDs and spinning drives to maximize performance and still offer low cost, high capacity storage.

Boot time is said to be especially improved, with a claim from Lenovo of up to a 66% reduction. Unfortunately this system will only be available on these select IdeaPads for now, but a ThinkPad version isn’t out of the question.

Matt Kohut covered this topic well, so I’ll let him cover the important details:

The breakthrough is using a Lenovo patent-pending technology that connects both the SSD and HDD simultaneously as one big, contiguous drive.  Unlike my setup above, this storage is dynamically pooled and managed.  The end user does not need to do anything.  The system manages the SSD depending on usage. Programs, documents, and other files are dynamically moved on and off of the SSD so that you can always get the fastest speed possible.

This sounds like a neat system, but its success will be determined by two things. The first is of course price: I know Lenovo is very sensitive to price, so they wouldn’t do this if it was going to be cost prohibitive, but value in the eyes of the customers is what matters in the end.

The exact implementation will also be important to ReadyDrive’s success with customers. A black box that magically routes all the data where it would best go sounds nice on paper, but in practice it must be flawless. One question that enters my mind is partitioning. It would be safe to assume that there must be at least one partition on the HDD where ReadyDrive can play with all its data, but can there be an additional one that remains untouched? Questions, questions.

You can also view a Q&A on Lenovo’s website here.

Source: [Inside the Box]