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By David Rothman

image Hmm. Has Brewster Kahle at the Internet Archive checked this out? Or maybe put this into practice already? And how about other e-book-related users of mass storage?

The Financial Times says solid-state flash drives “are making inroads at both ends of the computer market—finding a place in small netbooks and also beginning to replace the traditional hard-disk drive for data storage in the enterprise.”

Pliant Technology says the savings over hard drives can be gigantic, and that reliability improves. “New hybrid implementations can cut the cost of storage by around 50 per cent and running costs by nearly 90 per cent,” FT reports. Excerpt about Pliant:

It cites as an example a typical enterprise application where 640,000 transactions a minute can be taking place on an 18-terabyte database.

This would normally require 1,000 small-capacity disk drives to enable faster access to data and higher performance. They would take up 40 rack-mount shelves, cost $450,000 and require 16,000 watts to operate and cool them.

Again, when it comes to digital libraries, I don’t meant to limit this to the Internet Archive. What about the much larger Google digitization projects? Or the born-digital initiative at the Library of Congress? Or various European collections?  Furthermore, how about publishers and their various systems for storing, managing and tracking data?

Related: Techmeme roundup, plus Pliant product page touting SSD tech.

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