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Flash drives pronounced pointless

Fujitsu boss says solid state overstated
Tue Jul 08 2008, 12:58

FUJITSU'S VICE PRESIDENT of business development has dismissed solid state hard drives (SSD) as pointless and says his outfit will not be making any for at least two years.

Joel Hagberg told Computerworld that the technology was half-baked and needed a few technology breakthroughs before he would be interested.

He said that the only place in the market where flash was worthwhile was improving random-read performance, such as relational database look-ups, and tables.

Hagberg also said that the case for the capability of solid state was overstated, saying that notebook manufacturers have suffered with their customers expectations for the technology falling short.

"People do not realise that flash is really good if you're reading stuff, but it doesn't work very well for large file reads and large file writes, and it doesn't work well for random writes," Hagberg said. "Solid State drives in laptops don't boot faster and do not save that much energy over traditional technology." µ

L'Inq
Computerworld

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Look behind words

Surely, they didn't spill any plans of doing SSD laptops yet. Surely marketing, then.

Now: it is an emerging technology. In the next few years, we will have SSDs for operational purposes, and platter-based (but huge & speedy) drives for storage and media content. It is as simple as that.

If you understand this for yourself, everything PRs are saying seems obvious -- for Seagate, for FS, for anybody not in the business. 


posted by : linkos96, 09 July 2008 Complain about this comment
Most SSDs don't have cache RAM yet.

Every modern HD, even the cheapest ones, have cache RAM on them. The RAM dramatically improves the net performance of the drive. Most SSDs don't have cache RAM yet.

FlashRAM would be better used as a PCIe card mapped by the MMU instead of though the serialized legacy disk system.

posted by : Ugly American, 09 July 2008 Complain about this comment
Are you sure about that one...

* Democracy will be dead by 1950 - John Langdon-Davies

Are you really sure about that one, i'm talking in the UK and USA! Cause i defanitly dont see a democracy, i see capitalism diguised as democracy!!!

As for SSD's, they are a way forward but have tio agree, they're like the Nokia N95 compared to the N95 8GB Version!!! N95 is a terrible phone released to early to make money back on development whereas the 8GB version is what it shouyld have been in the 1st place. Just wait a year or two and as said, everyone will be using them. And fujitsu would have cought up with the compertition

posted by : Ian, 09 July 2008 Complain about this comment
Not exactly true..

SSD and hard drives are as fast as its slowest part... and the slowest part is always the connection between the hard drive/SSD to the motherboard... SSD is TONS and TONS faster than a hard drive, that is a fact! It just needs a larger bandwidth to move all that data and it doesn't... so hard drive lovers are sorely wrong, SSD is much faster but the problem with SSD is that there is no "unlimited" reads/writes in SSD, so it "does" have a limited lifespan... just like hard drives...

posted by : John, 09 July 2008 Complain about this comment
Hype

I can agree here. This technology has been over-hyped and expensive. Let's all wait a few years for this to actually become useful and affordable.

posted by : Coma, 08 July 2008 Complain about this comment
This one...

... will take it's place in history along with other famous quotes like :

* Everything that can be invented has been invented - Charles H. Duell
* Democracy will be dead by 1950 - John Langdon-Davies
* Reagan doesn’t have that presidential look — United Artists Executive, rejecting Reagan as lead in 1964 film The Best Man
* Man will not fly for 50 years - Wilbur Wright
* There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home - Ken Olson
* A rocket will never be able to leave the Earth’s atmosphere - New York Times
* Read my lips: NO NEW TAXES - George Bush

... and so on...

posted by : Philippos, 08 July 2008 Complain about this comment
The dude should try an SSD before opening his mouth

"solid state drives don't boot faster"

I have one and they do boot faster - a lot faster.
I'd say an SSD is the best investment you can get, unless you have very little RAM. It makes the computer feel like it's running on steroids. No more waiting for programs to launch or the desktop to load.

posted by : Sven Nilsson, 08 July 2008 Complain about this comment
Speed isnt everything

The realiability alone is the reason I have one 32GB SSD in my computer as a backup drive to my 4 x Sata in raid 10.
I dont trust platter based mechanical drives as far as I can throw em.

and by the way, unlike SSD's, when you throw any drives with mechanical readers in them, they break, ssd's do not...generally

posted by : bangers, 08 July 2008 Complain about this comment
yeah right

Fujitsu, like Seagate, simply neglected to invest in SSD technology and now tries to play it down, calling it pointless, and - probably - financing junk articles like the one recently published on Tom's Hardware.
I seruously hope that both companies get burned with their strategy. The surely won't be able to prevent SSD technology from making progress. By next year they will be a standard option in most laptops.

posted by : santos, 08 July 2008 Complain about this comment
unbiassed opinion lol



fujitsu makers of hard drives since 1968, bloody hell, so being able to BOOT (pun intended) a flash drive up and down the block without it breaking must be a gimmick then, weight/compactness in laptops/mobile devices etc etc etc dont come into the picture, relability has........................forget it, hmmmmmmmmm time to unload those fujitsu shares in my portfolio methinks !! O_O

posted by : psychochief, 08 July 2008 Complain about this comment
He has a point...

all tests conducted by respected sites proved that indeed, the power savings were very little over normal hard-drives. Maybe a hard drive does not consume that much after all :) for it's performance return... Instead they should focus on developing LCD's that consume less and maybe motherboards/CPU's/graphic cards that are not power hungry...I'm no fruit themed fanboy but they use LED's for displays, not inverters like rest of us...think about it.

posted by : deio, 08 July 2008 Complain about this comment
But they are solid state

so you can fling them about while in use without gyroscopic forces wrenching the spindle axis.

excellent for using your "subnotebooks" while practicing ballet or gymnastics or bunjee jumping or speed orienteering or something, ie good for reliability in mobile-activ applications but not a plus (or a minus) for platform performance enhancement. Office networks, SOHO & gamers just dont need them.

All you marketing types just musnt miss-sell them and raise false expectations is all (but this is like asking Italians not to make icecream, am I right?).

posted by : Richard, 08 July 2008 Complain about this comment
Umm


"My notebook with a 28-second boot with a standard drive would go down to 21 or 22 seconds with a hybrid drive. Personally, I wouldn't pay for that"

I would!!! And I think alot of other people would aswell.

posted by : Brady, 08 July 2008 Complain about this comment
cost

But they are cheaper than a traditonal harddisk. (atleast if you use less than 20GB of space)

posted by : cha, 08 July 2008 Complain about this comment
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