Mannerisms

Joel Hagberg, Fujitsu's vice president of business development, has told Computer World that Fujitsu will not adopt SSDs in its computers until manufacturers "resolve the performance problems of solid state in sequential reads and writes as well as random writes."

According to Hagberg: "SSD doesn't work very well for large file reads and large file writes, and it doesn't work well for random writes."

Hagberg reckons boot times are often no faster, and that power consumption isn't much improved often amounting only to five per cent, or 15 min of life on a five-hour battery. 

Moreover lifetime is an issue with SSD. "100,000 writes as a spec across the industry, and with MLC, you may reduce it to one-tenth of that or less - 10,000 writes per cell with two bits, or maybe even 1,000 writes per cell with three or four bits per cell," says Hagberg.

He concedes that: "Solid-state drives are good in some narrow niche applications where you're focused on random reads. They're great for handhelds, cellphones, iPods, MP3 players."

Hagberg reckons that phase-change memory or MRAM may solve the problems of SSD.

Hagberg quotes John Monroe of Gartner who estimates 2007 shipments of solid-state notebooks were about 98,000 out of about 120 to 130 million computers shipped. 

Hagberg adds, most of those users wouldn't buy another one due to dissatisfaction and that 90 per cent of computer shipments will have HDDs for the next few years.

According to Tom's Hardware: "The touted power savings of SSDs over their moving-parts-laden cousins are nonexistent. In fact, SSDs are sucking more power than conventional hard drives."

Tom's Hardware reckons there's an explanation: "While moving hard drives have higher power requirements on paper, in reality, those peaks are only reached when random data is being searched out. On average, these drives have become very power efficient and rarely peak even when data is being accessed."

"SSDs, on the other hand," continues Tom, "pretty much have an "on" mode and an "off" mode. That's it. So while you are using your hard drive, that mode is pretty much always going to be the "on" one. SSD manufacturers haven't focused on other power saving principles at this time. And until they do, don't expect things to get any better."

Laptop Magazine has come up with an SSD-HDD comparison and, says it: "Tried the drives under a more "real world use" test regime: cycling through webpages over and over. And guess what? Both SSDs resulted in an extra 10 minutes of battery life, versus the native hard drive."

Someone resolutely convinced of the glittering future of SSD is Samsung, which announced this week it is putting 128Gbyte SSDs into mass production, and will put 256Gbyte SSDs into mass production by the end of the year.

That's the hi-tec business for you - everyone thinks they know better than the other guy.