Inside its cage, Dropbox is running servers equipped with
solid-state drives, also known as SSDs — super-fast storage devices that could
one day replace traditional hard drives. The company doesn’t use SSDs in all
its servers, but it’s moving in that direction. In other words, Dropbox is like
the web as a whole. Such names as Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Mozilla, and
Wikia are also using solid-state storage in their data centers, and judging
from anecdotal evidence, the trend goes even further. Like a hard drive, an SSD
is a device for storing information. But unlike a hard drive, it doesn’t have
any moving parts. Today’s SSD are built with flash
memory — the same stuff that stores data and applications on your iPhone. These
drives have been around for years, but they’ve been slow to make headway in the
real world, in part because they’re more expensive than traditional hard
drives.
