MySpace dumps hard drives for flash storage, uses 1% of the power

Solid-state hard drives are rapidly moving from luxury splurge item that CEOs drop into their $3,500 laptops to gear suitable for the mainstream.

SSDs differ from hard disk drives in that they use flash memory -- a lot like the kind in a camera memory card or a USB thumbdrive -- to store data. That means that unlike hard drives, they have no moving parts, which means they run infinitely cooler, aren't prone to breakage due to being dropped or through wear and tear on moving components, and use less power since they don't have to keep a metal platter spinning constantly.

The biggest news I've seen in months on this front comes from the company MySpace, which has taken the SSD plunge in a major way. How serious is the social network about SSDs? It tore out all the standard, spinning hard disk drives from its thousands of servers and replaced them with SSDs instead. Following the gutting, the company says it has reduced the money it spends on power and cooling of the old drives by a whopping 99 percent.

The technical details of the switch are pretty geek-heavy and you can safely ignore the talk of 1U vs. 2U rack-mount servers, but the ramifications for the general consumer are surprisingly cogent. The power and cooling savings alone are reason enough to consider an SSD when configuring a new computer these days. But capacities have also risen amazingly quickly -- 256GB SSDs are now readily available, with even bigger drives on the way -- and prices are dropping fast. A few years ago a 128GB SSD would have run you $1,000 or more at retail. Today you can find one for just $250 to $300. That's still a premium over an old-school hard drive (a 120GB hard drive would normally cost $80 or less), but that gap is shrinking incredibly quickly.

Is it time to make the move from hard disk to SSD? It might be another few years before the price differential gets close enough to justify the switch in all cases, but many buyers may find they're actually be ready to jump to SSDs now.