Not just about capacity

The main reason for choosing to go with SSD instead of convention hard drives is because of their I/O performance. When it comes to data transfer SSD aren’t much faster than high end desktop hard disks, in the server market they are slower. Also comparing SSD with 2.5” server disks there isn’t a huge amount of power consumption difference, the main reason for switching would be I/O performance, which SSD blows mechanical hard drives out the water with.

In a scenario where a company requires a lot of I/O bandwidth for their disks and only 400GiB of Data, and each disk is 100GiB. The company wouldn’t just buy four disks, this would leave a massive bottle neck because the disks can’t perform enough I/O operations. So you buy more disks so you have enough I/O operations, so the company instead buys 12 disks, to provide the require bandwidth. The net result is that company is only using 1/3rd of space of the hard disk.

With the above scenario again, but instead of using mechanical hard drives, they use 128GiB SSD, which’s I/O bandwidth far exceeds that of a mechanical drive. In this case you only need four to provide all the bandwidth and capacity needed. While a SSD vs. a mechanical hard drive in terms of power consumption is fairly close when you look at the above scenario its easy to see that 4 SSD hard disks are going to consume a lot less power than 12 mechanical hard disks.

For someone like good who require a lot of bandwidth for searching etc, its seems like a good idea, as capacity isn’t as much of an issue as I/O.

Seek time

SSD much better on random access applications (no seek time). And this have a good implications for data management, as data placement optimizations are simply not needed anymore. And from public descriptions of their technological approaches, their data is not so volatile, so biggest disadvantage of SSD won't bite them.

I guess that other search engines will follow the suit very soon. Except for MS, that will have problems due to its excessive reliance on the disk access in the OS (registry, logs, etc).

Prices Going DOWN 70% for XMAS

Its' True, with improvement in smooth operation & quality, SSD is diverting from mainsteam Manufacturers & starting Fast introduction that will ramp thru Summer'8, with Prices Dropping into affordable range near New Year, Over 70% decrease on smaller 32 gb SSD is expected.

Heres another note today from ATI: about Microsoft vista capable:

http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/library/vistaexhibitsone.pdf

Its more fascinating than SSD Conjectures.
drashek