On SSDs

Wired.com has a post up on companies that are moving to solid state drives to handle their server side storage needs. Several cloud computing companies(including Dropbox) are using them in instances in which they need to provide quick access. The numbers from the article indicate that SSDs offer something just over 200 times the read/write speed of traditional drives and about 15 times better power consumption, 1 watt as opposed to 15.

I thought this article was fascinating because when I think of services like the ones mentioned in the article, ones that employ server farms, I think of massive amounts of storage. I imagine multiple petabytes worth of hard drives sitting in racks. On the consumer side if you want a cost effective method of obtaining lots of storage you buy several terabyte hard drives for a couple of hundred dollars. Clearly, it’s not so simple on the server side.

The numbers I quoted above indicate the complexity of choosing what type of storage you’re going to use. SSDs are more expensive than HDDs(hard disc drives), but they run much, much faster, are much more energy efficient and do not need to be cooled because they do not generate heat(according to this forum post on tom’s hardware).

What this means is that while they are generally more expensive for consumers due to the initial cost of the hardware, they are cheaper for companies to use for databases and such due to power savings of the lifespan of the device. They also help the web services these companies provide run faster than they can with HDDs.

Now, besides getting my document downloaded from Dropbox faster, how does this help me? This is actually pretty exciting: as more companies buy more SSDs they become cheaper to produce and eventually become cheaper for consumers to buy as well as helping to lower the cost of building computers and(maybe, i hope, possibly) lower the cost of computers for consumers.

Andrew

Reading:

Tigana, Guy Gavriel Kay. Page 259/676