Fujitsu Favors Conventional Hard Disk Drive Over Solid State Device Due to Performance Issue

With the increase in memory capacity and reduction in pricing, memory storage technology has been trending towards SSD (Solid State Device) replacing conventional hard disk drive. This can be proven with the release of new laptops with embedded SSD from few giant PC makers such as Dell, Toshiba, Asus and even Apple. However, not all of the market leaders are having the same perception, at least this is true for Fujitsu, that still feel that the current SSD technology still can’t totally replace the Hard disk drive in short future.

No doubt, SSD stands a few great advantages in terms of better reliability and lower power consumption when comparing to conventional hard disk. Without the spinning mechanism, it is less susceptible to mechanical drop or vibration. However, it does have few major drawbacks in the nature of how the new SSD mechanism works. According to Fujitsu’s Vice President, Joel Hagberg, SSD does have a major performance issue of solid state especially in random writes as well as in sequential reads and writes. It may be ok when the users perform small data read from SSD, but the performance will drop significantly when reading or writing large files continuously. He further emphasized that the ultra low power consumption may not be as great as what have been claimed by other manufacturers. And more importantly, although it can sustain more intensive mechanical stress, but electronically it may suffer reliability issue with only 10000 or 1000 writes per cell with two bits or four bits respectively. This is far below industry acceptable standard as compared to conventional hard disk drive that is capable of handling 100,000 writes without failure.

Depending on what type of applications the usage is targeted for, other than costing factor, there are additional pros and cons that users need to consider before switching to SSD.