Solid-State Drives vs Hard Disk Drives

In this article we are comparing traditional hard disk drives with solid-state all flash drives to see if a solid-state drive could be the answer.

Traditional hard disk drives (HDD) are made up of moving parts that use spinning metal platters with a magnetic coating to store data.  A read/write head accesses the data while the platters are spinning. A solid-state drive (SSD) has no moving parts and the data is stored on interconnected flash memory chips that retain the data even when there is no power source.

The data in an SSD is stored electronically as opposed to an HDD which stores the data magnetically.

Advantages of Solid-State all flash Drives:

• It uses flash memory to store data, which provides better performance and reliability over an HDD
• Due to the fact that there are no moving parts means that an SSD will not fail due to mechanical wear and tear.
• There is no start up time for SSD as it is always on, as opposed to waiting for the platter in an HDD to spin up. Boot up time is much quicker with SSD.
• As there are no moving parts, the SSD makes no noise.

Disadvantages of Solid-State all flash Drives:

• SSD’s are more expensive than the traditional HDD’s.
• SSD’s are becoming more available in the market place but not as abundant as HDD’s.
• An SSD has an endurance rating which means the memory cells can only be written to a finite number of times before they stop working. However, because the read/write cycles are optimised it is highly likely that the system will become obsolete way before any read/write errors occur on the SSD.

Conclusion:

SSD’s are currently the fastest form of storage available providing more efficient load times for applications and data transfer making them ideal for high availability web applications with vast databases as the I/O read and write times are much faster.

The fast speed comes from the flash memory chips which, unlike tradition HDD’s, have no moving parts so they are not susceptible to mechanical problems.  SSD’s are more reliable, physically smaller and less power hungry than HDD’s, but they do cost significantly more.

So, if you are experiencing slow response times for your web applications and it is affecting your business, give Datanet a call on 01252 810010 to talk to us about a solid-state dedicated server hosted in Aspen House Data Centre. It could give your business the boost it needs.