Yeah, the effect of the DDR is the big mystery here. Will it really work to improve things?
You would think it should help with responsiveness on short-term intensive tasks that saturate the ability of the NAND controller and NAND chips to respond. It's basically adding another layer of cache that should be faster than the (main) NAND chips.
If the DRAM controller has good logic and guesses correctly what the user needs to get from the drive most of the time, then this might be a winner.
On the other hand, if they are just out to say that they were the first to add DRAM cache, but do a sloppy implementation of it, then it will be useless.
This is what killed the first hybrid drives (sloppy implementation with too little NAND cache) and what makes the current Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drives a success, with good controller logic implementation with enough NAND cache to make a difference.
I hope Silicon Power gets the technology right and also offers the drives at a reasonable price. A premium for better performance is okay, but a steep premium would be a mistake in the ever more competitive and price sensitive SSD market.
-