Google testing Intel SSDs

Google could be toying with the idea of moving over to Solid State Disk (SSD) technology, according to Digitimes which says the company has just bought a load of them from Intel.

Digitimes claims that Google’s newly-purchased technology is a combined Intel/Marvell offering, with the SSDs based on Intel’s technology and the server controller chips being provided by Marvell.

The report claims the drives are destined to be used at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California, and will ship by the end of the second quarter at the very latest.

SSDs, which use flash memory instead of the heavier and more energy-consuming rotating magnetic plates used in HDDs, have been becoming more and more popular of late. Although their capacity levels still aren’t up to much, it’s easy to see how the significant performance boosts and low energy requirements that SSDs provide would be attractive to an Internet behemoth like Google, which is obviously keen on testing them out.

Google has thousands of servers, and the company also has somewhat of a reputation for coming up with most of its own hardware and software products.

This could mean that Google plans to build on the SSD technology in order to come up with new "Google-ised" SSDs ideally suited to the firm’s specific needs.

Due to its potential for eventual wide scale deployment by the search engine giant, however, Digitimes speculates that the move could result in a profound shortage of 16Gb and 32Gb NAND flash chips.