HLDS (Hitachi-LG Data Storage) might be onto something here. The company just introduced its second generation SSD/ODD hybrid drive with SATA 6Gpbs support, giving laptop and all-in-one (AIO) owners an easy upgrade path to SSD.

"We are very excited about the potential of this ground-breaking product. Once the Hybrid Drive is loaded in all PC products, including AIO, mini PC, and notebook, a new solution will be provided for user classes who were previously unsure of purchasing an SSD. And our Hybrid Drive also enable a smaller PC footprint (under 12-inch tablet PCs such as the Ultra Mobile PC, for example) by removing the HDD or SSD from the motherboard and just having the Hybrid Drive with SSD as its primary storage," stated HLDS Chief Marketing Officer YK Park.

The beauty of a hybrid ODD/SSD is that many notebooks and nearly all netbooks ship with a single drive bay, while larger notebooks typically ship with two bays at best. That can make upgrading to an SSD a tough proposition -- do you really want to swap out your 500GB HDD for a 64GB SSD?

HLDS's second-gen Hybrid Drive sidesteps the issue by incorporating a speedy SSD into the optical drive, which can then be used independently or in tandem with the existing HDD as a hybrid SSD/HDD solution somewhat similar to Silverstone's HDD Boost.

You can check out some performance numbers here.