Baidu to use SSDs instead of hard disks

Solid State Drives use NAND memory (flash) and have
the same interfaces as hard disks. As of 2009, says
Takehito Soeda, marketing director at Baidu Japan
Inc of Japan, "We plan to use SSDs for several tenths
of all search servers, and 100% of Web search servers."
The company selected SSDs after analyzing existing
data center requirements and reviewing technology
trend forecasts for the future. According to
Baidu Japan's Soeda, "The volume of data handled by
the search engines has grown enormously, and the volume
of data to be processed per unit time is still growing at a
frightening pace. We don't expect the pace to slacken any,
either."

Baidu took a long, hard look at just what type of storage
system would be optimal for the needs of the era.
Input/output (I/O) performance is low on a per-HDD
basis, and the only way to cope with surging data volume
would be to install massive numbers of HDDs running in
parallel. "We also considered whether this increased
scale was the best solution for the future," reveals
Soeda. "It became apparent that SSDs, with
I/O performance tens of times faster than HDDs,
were very promising."