This article makes a case that many of us will consider obvious – that solid-state drives are preferable to hard disk drives. We will proceed as follows:
>>> Intro – speed
>>> The Register – HDD and expense
>>> The Register – “winning the argument”
>>> Adaptation – the new era
>>> Conclusion – VPS hosting options
Intro – speed
In the spring, we upgraded our SSD cloud VPS server platform to include 100% enterprise solid-state drives. We will look at how those features have been adjusted below as an example of SSD hosting in action.
Solid-state drives are generally chosen because they are fast.
Two basic reasons they are fast compared to the standard option – SATA (serial ATA) hard disk drives (HDD’s) – is that they don’t contain any moving parts and can access data “immediately,” typically within 10 µs (i.e., 10 microseconds, each of which is equivalent to 1 millionth of a second).
For a fuller explanation of the SSD versus HDD debate, let’s review an op-ed report prepared by Trevor Pott for the United Kingdom’s The Register.
The Register – HDD and expense
In his November 7 article for The Register, Pott did mention that there is still one strong suit of magnetic HDD’s. They cost less per byte than do solid-state drives.
That is of course something to take into account if you are purchasing a drive for your own computer or business’s data center. However, the specific expense of a drive is not a concern with hosting solutions because it is built into the overall price.
The real question in the case of hosting, and to assess alongside cost if getting drives for your own purposes, is, “Are they worth it?”
The Register – “winning the argument”
Here are the characteristics that make SSD a better choice than HDD, per Pott:
1. Low failure rate
As Pott points out, it’s not easy to figure out the write life of drives industry-wide because many online part stores don’t offer that information. You also sometimes don’t know based on the number of returned drives how many of the applicable drives were sold.
Pott notes that for any type of computing drive, “a good model” will have a return rate under 1%. If a return rate reaches 2%, it becomes “questionable.” If the rate exceeds 4%, Pott says that the poor reliability of the drive is “flat-out appalling.”
He cites Hardware.fr, a French component shop that monitors return rates of everything it sells and presents the data openly on its site.
According to the information on the site, the rate of return for SSD’s and SATA drives is about the same.
As an aside, Pott recommends specifically against OCZ, which has products on the French site with return rates as high as 52% (labelled by Mark Prieur of Hardware.fr as “catastrophic”).
With the note to avoid that particular brand (assuming the data here is itself reliable – it seems to be), Pott makes it clear that SSD has come a long way in recent years with regards to reliability.
2. Backed by the manufacturer
Pott makes the cogent point that the warranty period of a drive is the best way to tell its quality: it represents a conservative gamble for the manufacturer that the average disk in that line will make it through the term of the warranty. As Pott puts it, “It is an expression of confidence in the reliability of that model expressed in cold, hard accounting.”
Some SATA drives have warranties as low as 1 year. On the contrary, it is typical for SSD’s to have warranties that last 3 to 5 years.
3. Optimal performance
The speed of an SSD is superior to that of a traditional magnetic drive.
4. Low latency
You don’t have to wait around, due to “way lower latency.”
5. Energy-efficient
Solid-state drives require less resources to run.
6. Physically concentrated
A solid-state drive is smaller than a hard disk drive.
Adaptation – the new era
Like any technology, solid-state drives are continually improving, as are other parameters of platforms based on them. Here is how we have adapted our SSD cloud VPS server platform to keep pace with, and outpace, the evolving market:
- Complete reengineering with the latest stable virtualization technologies
- Implementation of 100% enterprise solid-state drives for up to 100 times better performance
- Increase in port size to 1 Gbps, so that webpage serving and downloads occur more quickly
- Upgrade in core networking, so that the overall bandwidth is expanded with the introduction of stronger switches and routers
- New versions of operating systems from Windows, FreeBSD, and multiple Linux distributions.
Conclusion – VPS hosting options
Our goal, as always, is to deliver a stellar, reliable, and affordable product. If you have not yet experienced our SSD cloud VPS, we are excited to share some of these new features with you in the coming months. Deploy in 30 seconds, with 24/7 support and no contract, now!
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