SSD vs HDD Hosting

There are many asking themselves what is the difference between a hosting plan on SSD and one on HDD and which one is best? Let's start by stating the differences between the two:

1. HDD stands for Hard Disk Drive. The HDD is the traditional hard drive that stores data on platters. The Hard Disk head stores and reads data from the platters by moving around it's axis while the platters spin extremely fast. This implies a mechanical action that leads to delayed response time. What does this mean for your website?
Pros:
-lots of disk space
-lower cost

Cons:
- very slow performance

If you are a start-up or your website doesn't require a high performance and has a low number of visitors you should consider a hosting plan on HDD.

2. SSD stands for Solid State Drive. If the HDD stores date on platters, the SSD stores data on microchips. Since it has no moving parts, the SSD has basically no delays in serving the write/read requests. What does this mean for your website?
Pros:
-high performance
-high transfer speed

Cons:
-limited storage space
-higher cost

If you have a busy website that requires a high performance, a fast response time and uses random data access, then you should probably consider a hosting plan on SSD.


In other words, there's no right or wrong answer. Before choosing a hosting plan you have to know exactly what you need: lots of storage at a cheaper cost or high performance for an extra cost. Both hosting options are good if chosen right.

 

SSD's certainly meet that high performance standard and it seems to be the trend that SSD is the more popular choice. Most who need that higher level of performance consider the extra cost well worth it.

 

I always try to go for SSD hosting, as they hard drives are much faster and don't take as much time to process the information. SSD's are the way of the future, and many more web hosts are now using them to replace HDD's. The only downside is the price as they cost a little bit more than HDD's.

 

Although SSD has a great speed and performance, it costs a lot and highly considerable for mission critical project, while SAS drives with RAID can be a good alternative.

 

That's true, and I can say that our own experience with SSD drives has not been great in either performance or reliability. We don't see considerable differences in boot-up speed or performance compared with 10K SAS drives, and when they are attached to a RAID array (which they invariably are) there's virtually no perceivable difference.

Where we've been really disappointed is the reliability. We've lost so many SSD drives to failures. No notice, they just stop working. There seems to be no consistency regarding time, set-up, or workload when it comes to the failures. We've lost over 20 SSD drives in the last 6 months (so we can't say we haven't tried) which is more than the total number of SAS and SATA drives we've lost over the last 2 years when there is over 30 times more of these over SSDs.

In theory they should be brilliant drives, but they just don't seem to be there yet when it comes to enterprise use - there's still a large gulf difference between expectation and reality. I'm positive the situation will improve over time but we're not rushing to replace everything with SSD just yet.

 

That sounds sad, 20 failed SSDs is pretty much and that could put under question reliability of the service in general. We use only SAS 15k drives with RAID, as they are proven in giving a great performance and reliability.

 

Our experience has actually been quite different. We have never lost a drive of any kind...ever, but maybe that's because we replace them every couple years. We don't leave old drives sitting around in servers forever. We have had RAID cards fail and such, but have yet to actually lose a drive. We run SSD drives exclusively on our VPS servers now, and they take a serious beating. Have yet to lose a single one...knock on wood.

As far as speed, our 15k SAS arrays can't come anywhere close to touching the SSD performance. We see well over 1GB/sec. any day of the week out of the SSD setups (4 drives). We don't even see that performance on 16 drive SAS arrays.

 

I know we're not alone with SSD reliability. I was speaking to a large system builder and they've had some of their other clients reporting similar issues to us as well as having problems of their own. These SSD drives were all new - well they might be up to 12 months old - but generally the failures occurred between 3 days and 6 months.

Cant remember losing a RAID card (had a couple DOA), but have seen a few (very few) motherboard failures, a few PSU failures (all from a single batch - prob a manufacturing issue), and LOTS of drive failures over the years although SATA and SAS reliability has improved in recent years.

It's not as if we were even purchasing desktop SSDs. We used Intel 500 series at the time and they weren't cheap. Maybe a different brand would have given different results, but I'm wary of them. I hope they are better because I'd like the performance potential. When it comes down to it, customers aren't going to notice millisecond differences in speed but they are going to notice services being down due to drive failures.

 

Hmmmm....that's weird for sure. We use Intel 5300's and Samsung 840 Pros and have not had a single failure. We have been through literally hundreds of drives without a single issue.

 

With SSD prices going down day by day, it's going to be very affordable within a few years. All of my websites are hosted on SSD's and my MacBook is SSD-based as well

 

yes, innovations are always replacing old school stuff, that's true, however it may take some time until prices will be affordable for 90% of customers as well as reliability proven for 100%.