Flash drives pronounced pointless

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."

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