SSDs (or Solid State Devices) are Flash or DRAM devices as opposed to magnetic hard drives which have spinning platters and heads to read the data off the platters.

SSDs are a lot faster than hard drives. They also use less electricity than magnetic hard drives, which saves battery power on a laptop. Currently, though, they’re too expensive to completely replace hard drives.

Using both SSDs and hard drives can be somewhat cumbersome. It’s best if you put your most used files on the fast SSD. But for most users, shuffling files around between SSD and hard drive is a burden.

Lenovo’s RapidDrive solves that problem by automatically allocating the most accessed files to the SSD, and putting lesser used files on the hard drive. As your usage changes, the allocation changes.

The Lenovo Blog featured the following YouTube video showing a laptop with RapidDrive finishing a script in 13 seconds vs. 30 seconds for a computer with a standard hard drive:

RapidDrive will be offered on certain IdeaPad models, and not ThinkPads at this time.

It’s unclear whether the technology will be available for Linux/Ubuntu at this time.

Resources

Lenovo Blog on Rapid Drive
Geek.com

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