Pardon me but it's the first time ever I heard about tiered storage (not caching hybrids which is handled by the drives themselves) being available outside of datacenters. Doesn't explain the +250$ price.
Besides, the whole tone of the article is full of useless hatred. The point could have been made without such aggressiveness.
What's more, the proposed solution is ludicrous:
- buy an external SSD
- install OSX on it
- wipe the internal disk
- manually manage files/applications/whatnot to be stored on the SSD or the disk.
I can't even begin to describe how such a scheme is brittle and contrived.
Can we stop pretending everyone out there is technically inclined? To us technical folks who know how to actually build the CoreStorage tiered array, 250$ may look like a steep price, but to the huge amount of real people out there, the convenience is well worth 250$, and for those it's not worth, well they'd stay with a spinner anyway.