Then, when you look at the promise of instant boot, load Microsoft Windows, Linux or other things on your notebook with a solid-state disk drive versus a hard disk drive, and you'll find out there's not much difference in the boot time. And you want to talk about application load, I can click on the icon for PowerPoint on my system here and start a presentation, and in less than a second, my application is loaded. So there doesn't seem to be any improvement I can see with a solid state drive. So there's a lot of talk about the performance advantages and power savings that don't translate into real-world experience [for] notebook users and then if you look at sequential and random writes where hard disk drives win today. Then, you can then go to the next step -- reliability -- and question that.

Solid state still needs a year or two to prove itself because reliability is still in question, whereas with a disk drive, you can write to the same spot on the disk millions of times. With [single-layer cell] solid-state disk, you're limited to 100,000 writes as a spec across the industry, and with MLC [multilevel cell] solid-state disk, 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.

So are you saying solid state is never going to be able to compete with hard disk drives?

Solid-state drives are good in some narrow niche applications where you're focused on random reads. They're great for handhelds, cell phones, iPods, MP3 players -- where you enter your songs one time and listen to them thousands of times -- but when it comes to high-performance network servers where you're writing a lot of information on a continuous basis, you need a map that tells you where the data is ... or you'll wear out your flash very quickly.

With solid-state disk you have wear-leveling algorithms [which more evenly distribute data across memory] or you need to track how many times you've written to every cell. So in addition to writing data and keeping track of where the data is, you have to keep track of how many times you've written to a particular cell ... and then translate that to keeping spot space available to move cell data once you've hit a certain limit on writes.

Now, do I think solid-state disk will become a large portion of the storage solution over time? Yes. Do I think it's over the next two years? No. It's still 5 per cent of the market over the next couple of years. Engineers will find ways to overcome write performance -- if you look at phase-change memory or MRAM, where you have magnetic recording memory that's attempting to overcome the write challenges of static storage.