[clarkbox]

think commodity... have ssd's reached the commodity level yet? from a commodity stand point, i think it would be far more likely that google would use an array of SD cards per node. SSDs are really just an array of SD cards anyway, with a pile of hype and marketing piled on. you would still get most benefits of an SSD. power usage (esp at idle) might even be less than an ssd. google could develop their own wear leveling algorithms, and the rest of the stuff that an SSD controller provides for the internal flash. replacement costs could be less as well over time.

[ajtaylor]

I was at a linux user group meeting recently where a talk was given by a Google sysadmin where he talked about hard drive reliability. Someone asked him about SSDs to which he replied that he couldn't talk about it. My take is that they are definitely trying out SSDs, but either 1) found SSDs provide a huge competitive benefit and don't want to publicly share that knowledge or 2) they simply don't have enough data yet. I'm leaning towards #1.