Wow I always thought Fujitsu had a good bead on the future, but I have to say that they are missing the mark on not introducing SSD drives in their line of laptops. In an article in ComputerWorld Joel Hagberg, Fujitsu’s vice president of business development, said his company does not plan to launch any solid-state disk-drive products over the next two years because the value proposition of the technology is not compelling enough and won’t be until technology breakthroughs change solid-state disk’s performance and reliability.
Me I think this is just plain poor business sense. It can be an option if the customer wants it and the drives don’t have to be stockpiled and could be ordered on demand if they don’t feel the demand is that high.However, you do net a cheaper price if you purchase in volume and set a price from a supplier. I think Fujitsu would be surprised by how many of its customers may request an SSD based laptop.
I myself have replaced my platter based HD for an SSD drive and notice some huge improvements in performance. Granted improving the base memory of my P1610 provided the most noticeable improvement in performance, but switching between my platter based hard drive and my SSD drive, I do notice significant performance gains that benchmarks may not be the true test, but user experience and perception are seen and felt. This may be largly due to the slower read/write times of Fujitsu’s hard drives, which are much slower than the competition, but when it comes to hard drives for casual use this is acceptable. For a higher end laptop I would say no.
A nice compromise, I don’t think lies in hybrid drives, but two drives one SSD or flash based drive like SanDisk’s onboard flash for motherboards called Vaulter, that was announced at CES 2008 ) and one platter based for your data, scratch, temp, and swap files like the old days of partitioning hard drives. I have been using flash memory for a few home built systems for a few years and it works great for some of my Media Center boxes that aren’t on all the time and require a fast boot up time of 14 seconds (the fastest I could get it to go with a platter-based hard drive was 25 seconds) until everything stops loading. I use a 40 pin IDE to CF Flash adapter I picked up at Fry’s on one of my many visits to Redmond. When you are waiting for something to start up a 10 second difference can feel like eternity. Granted in the "relative" scheme of things it isn’t that big of a difference, but perceived speed is huge in customer satisfaction and experience.
I have also got Tiny XP rev05 to boot in 8 seconds off of a hard drive and 4 seconds off of flash. 
Hopefully with the coming drop in price Fujitsu will change its mind as well as optimizations in the operating system of Windows Vista and OSX for SSDs will have a huge impact on SSD implementation.
Written by Steven Hughes - Visit Website
