While many major hard drive manufacturers have developed or are already selling solid state disk drives or hybrid drives, there are those who believe that the medium is not ready for prime time. Such is the case with Seagate, which has been known for downplaying the importance of SSDs in today's consumer market - all while suing makers of flash memory over patent infringement in a bid to prevent them from overtaking traditional storage.
Well, it now looks like Seagate has found an ally in its opposition to SSDs, with Fujitsu recently stating it does not plan to launch any solid-state disk-drive products over the next two years because the value proposition of the technology is not compelling enough.
In a recent interview by ComputerWorld with Fujitsu's vice president of business development, Joel Hagberg, he said the capabilities of SSDs have been greatly overstated. While he nonetheless predicts that SSDs will go mainstream eventually, he says they still need a year or two to prove their reliability and lifetime claims. In the interim, he says, flash-based storage is only good in some "narrow niche" applications where the focus is on random reads (rather than sequential) such as in cell phones, and MP3 players. Check out the complete interview here.