Times are changing – there are new requirements for hosting now. Among them, one can definitely point out speed and reliability. They are the main parameters that are really relevant. Both of these issues can be solved by using different servers (HDD or SSD), even though they are still quite expensive. Moreover, you need to know their distinctive features to choose the best ones. Let’s learn more about HDD and SSD servers and how you can use them.
HDD
Any HDD consists of magnetic disks and a read head. Their constant movement produces the familiar noise that occurs inside the system unit during any computer operation. Upon the impact, a read head and disks may shift, which causes different failures and data loss. However, such a design doesn’t tolerate mechanical damage.
The hard drive itself consists of light metal alloys, so its weight is slightly more than any SSD has. Besides, its performance is significantly poorer due to a very long time of making all the parts of a hard drive move and start working. In general, due to the process of constant friction, an HDD hard drive can overheat significantly, so our advice is to install some additional fans to cool your computer system. Server manufacturers also choose SSDs for another reason: with such a hard drive, your electrical energy consumption is significantly fewer. It means if you rent a rack for servers, you don’t have to overpay. (Modafinil) As a result, you can save money and spend them on improving your app.
SSD
An SSD drive looks like a chip with flash memory attached to the board. It’s totally silent as it contains no moving parts. The whole operation of a solid-state disk is based on the electronic, not mechanical, principle. Its stability threshold is relatively high – it can safely cope with shaking and mild shocks. The speed of writing data and reading it from an SSD device is significantly higher than an HDD has.
In 2009, when SSD drives were just about beginning to reach the market, their cost significantly exceeded the price of hard drives with the same storage hosting capacity. However, as the prices of SSD technologies decreased and the equipment of hosting companies was upgraded, solid-state drives began to replace hard drives everywhere. Moreover, it happened primarily because of high consumer demand, industry competition, and superior performance.
We want to underline that some companies still offer their HDD-based web hosting at a lower price than any SSD configurations, especially on a dedicated storage server and VPS. The virtual hosting rates don’t always clearly indicate whether the company offers HDD or SSD drives, although most web hosting companies declare the availability of SSDs.
HDD vs. SSD Servers
Any hard disk model, no matter if it’s an SSD or HDD, has its advantages and disadvantages. An HDD is a good old data store version; it remains relevant even now. However, sometimes, it’s replaced by an SSD model, which is a pretty good alternative choice with its prerequisites for some further development. As a result, we suppose that it’s helpful to know the distinctive features of any data storage server.
The main benefit of HDD drives is the lower price compared to SSDs. Almost all cloud hosting presented on the market today is based on SSD standards. Only a small group of budget hosting offers cheap HDDs. Besides, HDDs have a significantly higher failure rate compared to SSDs. However, some companies take advantage of HDDs in terms of the cost of data backup, external storage, and hosting large digital archives.
The research conducted on web servers has shown that solid-state drives transfer more data under any load. SSDs work, on average, 20 times faster when processing I/O requests. SSD performance is also determined by the data transfer rate, depending on the type of technologies used (SAS, SATA, PCI Express, Fibre Channel, USB, and PATA).
An ssd storage server has the following advantages:
- Average read and write speed over 500 MB/s.
- Lower power consumption.
- Reliability as they don’t have any moving parts and rotating discs that can fail.
- A 20-fold increase in I/O speed justifies the additional cost of SSDs.
In general, an SSD is a big storage server that is popular among app designers. We would say that it has only one significant disadvantage – the price. For small companies, it’s very hard to move from HDDs to SSDs as they need to improve their income several times. However, if you have enough money, you shouldn’t save on hosting. It can cause more trouble in the future.
Conclusion
All in all, if your web application is demanding system performance parameters, fast response to requests, and uses some large amounts of randomly located data, you should choose SSD drives. HDDs are suitable for small companies with average needs.
