Buffalo Announce New Type of External Hard Drive With DRAM Caching

Hybrid drives are starting to become a commonplace on the component market as a suitable upgrade solution for those wanting a drive with the capacity of a hard drive, but with read speeds that are more in the regions of a solid state drive. Keeping up with this new trend, Buffalo Technology has unveiled a new class of external hard drive which features a DRAM cache to offer faster read speeds to commonly accessed data.

Unlike an internal hybrid drive however, the HD-PGDU3’s cached area is not a true solid state partition with the cached data being held on volatile DRAM memory which is kept alive by an internal battery. Naturally this means that after a period of time the battery will run out of power and the cached data will be lost, however Buffalo do provide a small battery meter and in addition to providing the cache with power, the battery also ensures that there is no data corruption in the event of the drive being disconnected from the host device too early.

Two models of the drive will be available at launch with 500GB and 1TB capacities with both drives offering 1GB of DRAM cache backed by a lithium-ion battery. USB3.0 connectivity ensures the cached data can be accessed as fast as possible with speed of up to 400MB/s on offer.

There is no word on pricing or availability as of yet, but with Computex on the horizon we suspect any further announcements will be made in the coming weeks.

Source: Techpowerup