Opinion

posted on 10 July 2008 09:28

In a ComputerWorld interview Fujitsu Computer Products of America vice president of business development, Joel Hagberg, says flash drives are quite disappointing.

Fujitsu does not have a flash solid state drive (SSD) product in its range, which is deliberate. He thinks claims, coming from EMC, that SSDs will overwhelm tier one disk storage in two years are overblown. Notebook flash drive performance claims are also overblown with customers being disappointed on the performance gains.

While being good for random reads NAND flash in notebooks doesn't work well for large file reads and writes or for random writes. Boot times don't improve and power savings are over-rated. There are also reliability and write cycle duration issues with MLC (multi-level cell) flash being much worse than single-level cell (SLC) flash.

In his opinion more than ninety per cent of the shipped gigabytes of storage to the enterprise and notebook storage markets will be hard disk drives for the next few years.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}