SSD - Is this the memory platform for future server storage?
SSD stands for Solid State Drive. They are the latest type of computer storage device. These days you will find them in many high end desktops and laptops and they are increasingly being used in the hosting industry and by large corporations to store data within their server infrastructure.
In this blog we’ll look at the differences between traditional hard drives and SSDs and how they can help you improve your online presence.
The Main Differences between Traditional Hard Drives & SSD
Whilst they are the latest in a long line of innovations in data storage SSDs represent a significant departure point from the traditional architecture of hard drives. The major difference is that whereas traditional hard drives are effectively “mechanical devices”, SSDs are completely electronic – there are no moving components.
Traditional hard drives have been with us since the explosion of personal computing in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. During that time they have got physically smaller, exponentially bigger in terms of data capacity and much, much faster.
With SSD there are just no moving parts to have to deal with the data. Data is just sent (written) electronically to the storage space or retrieved (read).
The net result? SSDs are significantly faster and more reliable than their SATA or even SAS predecessors.
How Fast are SSDs?
When considering the speed of a hard drive, one key metric is called Input/Output.
“IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second, pronounced eye-ops) is a common performance measurement used to benchmark computer storage devices like hard disk drives (HDD), solid state drives (SSD), and storage area networks (SAN).” Basically, it specifies the speed at which data can be written to or read from the disk. All we need to remember is that the higher the IOPS, the faster the disk. With an SSD we need to look at the Read IOPS & Write IOPS separately because SSDs are manufactured for specific uses depending on whether they will be write intensive or read intensive.
OK, so we have established that SSDs are fast. That’s great. We all love speed, especially when it comes to computing and hosting. But speed is not an end in itself. But growing your business and getting an advantage over the competition is definitely an end in itself. It’s tough out there and you need every advantage you can get. This is especially so when Google has admitted that the speed that a page loads is one of its ranking factors.
SSD Means More Business
OK, it is not the ONLY factor, but speed counts. The main reason it counts and why Google takes this into account is because a faster website offers a better experience for the visitor and Google wants to offer the best possible experience for people using its search tools.
This is where SSD can help. Most hosting companies will not have deployed SSD across all of their servers due to the prohibitive cost of replacing their existing hard drives. Often you will find that you are hosted with hundreds or thousands of other customers on a shared server. However with VpsCity, one of our top VPS Hosting features is that all of our servers utilise solid-state drives (SSDs), which provide increased performance over standard hard disk drives (HDDs). Our SSD servers perform up to 20x faster than older generation HDD servers, giving you faster read/write speeds and faster delivery of your content to your end users.
But if you want a better ranking in Google, if you want to offer a better experience to your visitors then switching to SSD should be a no brainer, VpsCity is the only solution.
SSD is More Reliable
Reliability is another factor to bear in mind. Naturally, with any mechanical device such as a traditional hard drive there are likely to be hardware failures from time to time. Whilst hard drive reliability has steadily improved over the years, it will always be open to lower reliability than a purely electronic device such as an SSD. Obviously there are ways to mitigate this such as using hot swap disks in RAID Arrays (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks), but ultimately failure will occur at some point as components wear out. Now, that is not to say that SSD has got it all solved here. This is a relatively new type of storage device and over time the storage modules where the bits of data are stored do degrade over time. However, the generally accepted measure of Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) shows a significantly longer lifetime for SSDs when compared to traditional hard drives. That said, SSD has got off to a flying start in terms of reliability and that will only improve over time.
SSD is Greener
Another point worth considering is that SSDs require much less energy than traditional hard drives. In fact, they typically consume about one fifth of the electricity that traditional hard drives use. Not only that, they generate much less heat than normal hard drives. If you ever enter a data centre you will be surprised at how chilly and how noisy it can be. That is due to all of the cooling equipment required to keep the servers at an optimum temperature.
When you scale that all up to the size of a data centre and when you consider the amount of data centres globally that are required to cope with all the extra data we are all either consuming or producing then it is clear SSD technology has a central role to play in helping the industry to reduce their carbon footprint.
SSD – The Verdict
It seems clear that SSD is the future for data storage and in particular for web hosting. Sure, it is a relatively new technology, but it is like the arrival of jet engines over propellers – it is the future. But right here, right now it has several clear advantages over traditional hard drives, namely:
- SSD is much faster than traditional data storage
- SSD hosted sites offer a better user experience
- SSD hosted websites have the chance to win more business
- SSDs are more reliable than traditional hard drives
- SSD use much less energy than mechanical hard disks
So, if you want to sell more, experience less downtime and be kinder to the planet then it makes sense to switch to SSD. Switch to VpsCity, contact us today!