Google has spoken about SSD drives

http://www.zdnet.com/article/ssd-reliability-in-the-...

Thoughts?

I would not have thought SSD would have been used in servers, too expensive for a start for the amount of data they store.
While they work fine in my home computer, I am not sure if I would trust them in a server

They are used. Some hosting companies provide SSD-hosted plans.

In fact they are used a lot. Many enterprise storage platforms use SSDs as at least one of the layers in the array because of the performance gains it gives doing things like large database manipulation.

They perform just fine and because enterprise storage is highly redundant and has a lot of monitoring software any significant failures can be dealt with without taking down the storage array. The performance gains of SSD make them essential to many modern businesses.

There are also very considerable energy savings and this means less heat is produced. That brings significant savings for the datacentre not just in the lower electricity bill but also less infrastructure being needed to cool the racks.

To say nothing of less strengthened racking needed to counter the gyroscopic forces of all those rotating drives...

They should design servers so that every other drive is installed inverted.

In reply to a post by caffn8me:

There are also very considerable energy savings and this means less heat is produced. That brings significant savings for the datacentre not just in the lower electricity bill but also less infrastructure being needed to cool the racks.

That is true, but I wonder if it balances out cost wise.

One-off costs are less important in data centres than running costs and reliability.

We used them in the bank I worked for as cache and for loading high hit database files such as the indexes. And that is going back 20 years or so.