Wired.com has an interesting story on how SSDs are used by several large websites such as Dropbox, Facebook and Amazon. All of them store a lot of data and they are slowly moving to SSD drives. While the majority of their data is still on traditional hard disk drives, these large sites move data that is often requested or which can be cached to SSD drives on nearly all sites. Where laptop and desktop computers benefit from SSDs higher speed, less noise and even less energy usage, these large companies with their huge quantities of drives benefit even more. They save in energy and gain in speed while needing less traditional caching servers.
However, SSDs are known for wearing out and still being expensive, and these are problems to overcome. According to SSD evangelist Artur Bergman, SSDs failure mode is is preferred over that of HDDs as they first become slower before they totally break down. And the latter reason is also becoming less important as prices of SSDs are rapidly going down. And as Bergman adds: 'Don’t get fancy SSD card for tens of thousands of dollars. You don’t need to drive a Formula One car. You’re currently on a bicycle'. Head over to Wired for the entire story.
