Solid state search engine

If you are in the market for a solid state drive (SSD), you might as well hurry up, because Google has started buying. Unnamed sources are reporting that the search engine giant has ordered from Intel the first batches of SSDs for use in the company's HQ.

SSDs do not contain moving parts, and thus offer better energy savings and some performance improvements over run-of-the-mill hard drives. Good old HDDs beat this newfangled technology solidly in the price department -- SSDs are US$15 per GB compared to about US$0.50 for mechanical drives. Also, traditional hard drives offer more storage space per device -- there are no 500GB SSDs on the market, for now.

Solid state memory storage debuted recently in consumer laptops, and the move towards wide spread adoption in servers has now started.