Are you saying these things because Fujitsu is behind the curve on solid-state drives?

The statements I'm making are Fujitsu's observations of the real-world product. If you talk to anyone using the products, you should find a consistent message with what I'm telling you. I'm not saying something to slander a technology because we don't have a device. That would be meaningless. If a technology performs better than I'm stating, then my opinion is mitigated.

At this point, Fujitsu has looked at a number of things, such as hybrid drives, where you put flash on a hard disk drive. For the last couple of years, that was promoted as a way to improve I/O and really to improve performance, and Fujitsu took a look at it, designed some products in the lab and checked performance. While some of our disk-drive competitors got very aggressive in hyping it, Fujitsu's internal testing showed negligible performance improvement. Even Microsoft Windows Vista, the OS supposedly geared for the hybrid or flash-enabled drives, didn't have any significant boot improvement. My notebook with a 28-second boot with a standard drive would go down to 21 or 22 seconds with a hybrid drive. Personally, I wouldn't pay for that, adding flash cost to a drive to see a 6-second improvement to the boot.

Two years ago, a lot of our competitors were hyping these drives, Fujitsu elected not to release the product we developed in the laboratory after benchmarking it because there's no value proposition for this drive.

Two years later, the market doesn't see the value in those competitor's hybrid drives.

When you look at solid state, there is tremendous hype. Talking to John Monroe of Gartner, he estimated 2007 shipments of solid-state notebooks were about 98,000. You're talking about a market where you have 120 million or 130 million notebooks shipping. And if you polled all those users, they probably wouldn't buy another one because most of them bought them based on performance statements that haven't translated into real-world performance.

So it's fair to say Fujitsu will wait at least two years before coming out with a line of solid-state disk drives -- other than NOR?

We do believe that phase change or other types of memory probably will replace the current generations of solid-state disk drives in years to come. The question is, the companies making a lot of hype with storage and server vendors right now with the announcement of solid state in their systems, can they over come the performance issues of writing? A lot of them are composing combinations of DRAM with battery backup in combination with NAND to overcome the write problems. So I think there will be solutions.

We'll monitor it and look at it from both an internal development perspective as well as with partners that we work with in memory technology to determine the right time to enter this market, but as you said, it's probably a couple years away before there will be mainstream adoption of this technology.

At Fujitsu, we've been in the disk drive business since 1968 ... and we do our own heads and own media and have third-party agreements that also do heads and media as our second sources. From a value in terms of dollars per gigabyte, as well as the I/O read/write data rate, disk drives are still not threatened by solid state in the mainstream enterprise server market or in the notebook space. The vast majority -- 90 per cent-plus -- of shipments over the next few years will still be hard disk drives.