From home and office PCs, to data centers and web hosting providers, time is ticking for the traditional platter-based hard disk drive. Recent generations of Solid State Drive (SSD) storage devices are silent, more reliable, faster and consume less power. As their unit prices have fallen and storage size has increased, they have become a practical choice for all types of server and PC usage, including hosting.
While traditional hard disk drives now offer vast storage of up to many terabytes, that only becomes a benefit when dealing with huge file sizes or massive quantities of media. For most website hosting tasks, an SSD is now a more reliable option and provides faster performance.
Modern SSD drives come with the additional reliability benefits and performance with sustained high-speed data transfer capabilities and very low seek times, making them faster in operation. An SSD drive will give website server performance a boost over a traditional drive. All those benefits come while being faster for database-heavy work including Joomla, e-commerce, WordPress and similar site services like online forums and blogs. Some new generation SSDs also feature a self-healing technology, to ensure performance remains high over long periods of use, and that any errors are repaired.
The performance boost comes from the SSD being able to handle lots of small data requests very quickly, while traditional drives take time to spin up and locate data. The older-type drives are useful for streaming media content such as video, but website requests mostly consist of thousands of tiny commands that the SSD can race through thanks to its faster seek times.
If your site does have a media heavy focus, then hosting across split media is an option, with the traditional hard drive used for bulk storage and the SSD used for the web code and databases. This is an increasingly common deployment on servers and home PCs, with the OS going on the faster drive and the rest going to the bulk storage drive. Then again, with common SSD drive sizes approaching 2TB, and with 500GB drives easily available, there may not be much need for traditional drives.
Investing in SSD storage brings performance benefits worth the small extra cost, and they help data centres and hosters save energy and reduce heat in their racks, which can help reduce the overall costs of the service. Whatever your hosting needs, get in touch and we can find the ideal solution.
