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SSD Drives or (Solid State Disks) are much more common in consumer electronic devices like ultrabooks, high end desktops and more because of their incredible read and write performance. These SSD drives can help users become more productive by making Windows and applications load faster, cache data faster and can generally improve the performance of any system that does a high number of read and write operations to a disk.
SSD drives are however more expensive than their platter counterparts though they are coming down in price, you can get 2TB or more of hard drive space for the price of 480GB of SSD storage give or take a little. In the corporate world SSD drives are being dramatically adopted but more in the client desktop and laptop space than in the actual server platform, though adoption is growing the stability and longevity of SSD drives is still in question and their much higher prices and lower storage capacity make them less than ideal for database machines that need dozens of Terabytes of storage.
This IT survey done in August 2013 showed a trend where SSD drives were being used. In the survey SSD drives were used in 12% of servers, but 79% of PC desktops, laptops and 42% mobile devices.
Source: Kroll Ontrack UK
SSD drives will keep coming down in price and stability will keep improving, but how long before they become more of a standard and capacities can be increased to multi-terabyte levels? Most likely hybrid SSD’s will become more standard to allow for greater capacity and some performance gained on the most frequent operations.
I know on my personal computer I am using 2 SSD drives for my OS and some application installations/media work but I still rely on my platter disk drive for my long term storage that is relatively static.
Where do you see SSD drive adoption in 2 more years, do you predict 50% of servers will be running on SSD drives?