ADVERTISEMENT

Gartner reports that Google holds the 7th spot in a list of vendors with the largest revenues coming from SSDs. Google is listed as the 4th place of enterprise SSDs with a revenue share of 8.9% in that market. The list with revenues of consumer drives doesn’t include the search giant. Nevertheless, Google is among the top 10 overall SSD vendors when measured by revenue. That’s interesting as it will be hard to find someone who has bought a Google SSD drive.

ADVERTISEMENT

Gartner is a respected research company, so the numbers have to come from somewhere. There have been rumors in the market that Google has been buying Marvel controllers and Intel NAND, but they have never been confirmed. It is known that the search giant uses SSDs to power many of their servers that are used to serve results to internet users around the globe. Besides users searching, these servers also power the Google advertisements, their own cloud service, and numerous other data intensive services.

Using SSDs in data centers makes sense as they consume less power, produce less heat and can be of smaller size than traditional HDDs. Modern enterprise level SSDs are pretty reliable but in case that would be an issue, Google is know to distribute their data redundantly. Any drawbacks of decreased endurance might not be really an issue. The cost per GB might be an issue, so it’s likely that Google will use SSDs to serve data that’s needed fast.

Google also uses SSDs in Chromebooks. These are usually manufactured by other companies but they also sell them under their own brand, like the Google Pixel.

ADVERTISEMENT

When it comes to revenues of consumer level SSDs then Samsung is by far the largest. The company makes up for nearly 35% of the market and is followed by Toshiba, Intel, Micron, Sandisk, OCZ, Lite-on and Kingston. In the enterprise SSD market Intel is in the lead with with almost 18%, followed by Fusion-io, Samsung and then Google.