Fujitsu bets the farm on SSDs

by Thomas Ricker, posted Apr 11th 2007 at 9:01AM

Good news SSD fans: Fujitsu has halted their planned production of 1.8-inch hard disk drives due to increased interest in using solid state disks in handheld devices. A Fujitsu spokesman said, "We want to see if the market tips toward flash, or if it stays with hard drives." The move effectively leaves the 1.8-inch HDD market to the likes of Seagate, Toshiba, and Samsung. It's interesting to note that Fujitsu already offers SSD drives as options in their Lifebook Q and B laptops and P1610 Tablet PC. However, "their" SSDs aren't home cooked, they come by way of Samsung. To the best of our knowledge Fujitsu has no formal plans to enter the burgeoning flash drive industry at all; a market where Samsung already reigns supreme with Toshiba (via their partnership with Sandisk) coming on strong. With SSDs dropping in price by about 60% annually, we can't say that we blame Fujitsu for bailing.

[Via iLounge, thanks Erion 1]

Filed under: Storage

Tags: 1.8-inch, disk, fujitsu, hdd, solid state disk, SolidStateDisk, ssd

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Neutral

cheeesesauna @ Apr 11th 2007 9:29AM

Good move. We'll have sub $300, 64 GB drives available everywhere by the end of the year, possibly 128 GB.

Neutral

MeatPopSci @ Apr 11th 2007 9:39AM

let it roll baby, papa needs a new SSD/LED/HD+-RW Mac Book Pro!

Neutral

strider_mt2k @ Apr 11th 2007 11:21AM

cheeesesauna, from your keyboard to God's browser my friend.

Neutral

Karl @ Apr 11th 2007 1:03PM

Bah, I hate flash storage. Limitations on the number of erase-write cycles bug me, as an engineer.

I remember that with a certain recent generation of Windows Mobile devices, performance dropped dramatically by somebody's stupid decision to use flash RAM. It was better for battery life, because it could power down and resupply the power without flushing RAM contents, but to make it last longer than a few months, they had to decrease performance by lots of jiggery pokery.

Of course, that doesn't mean much when talking about flash storage (other than RAM), but these limitations can come up after a few years of use.

Neutral

don @ Apr 11th 2007 1:20PM

Where do you get that title. They are not betting anything. Fujitsu is doing what they do best, getting out of markets they don't see potential in.

Neutral

TechnoFreak @ Apr 11th 2007 3:55PM

I can't wait till SSD becomes mainstream!

Neutral

Diego AC @ Apr 11th 2007 6:24PM

actually fujitsu was already in the flash memory business (Spansion)

Neutral

王安庆 @ Apr 12th 2007 8:24PM

看来SSD势不可挡了~~是否以后就会完全是SSD的天下呢？

Neutral

Sean @ Apr 13th 2007 6:09PM

樓主是問未來除了SSD之外，還有什麼其他的硬碟替代產品吧^^"

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