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<\/p>\nIn the worlds of web hosting (or any servers, or portable hard drives, for that matter) there are two types of storage\u2014hard disk drives (HDD) and solid state drives (SSD). Hard disk drives are the hard drives you\u2019re probably most familiar with. They feature a spinning disk that stores the information, and for a long time they dominated the information storage industry because they were the only practical option.<\/p>\n
Solid state drives are somewhat of a new development. In SSDs, the data is stored in microchips and there are no moving parts. Until just a few years ago, solid state technology just didn\u2019t have the capacity to store enough data to make these types of drives a cost-effective solution. Now, this is no longer the case.<\/p>\n
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Solid state drives have a number of benefits over their counterparts:<\/p>\n
Unlike HDDs, solid state drives have no spinning disk, and that means less wear and tear on the whole system. This reliability translates to less downtime for your site. Because SSD\u2019s don\u2019t have to deal with fragmentation like HDD\u2019s, data can also be found more reliably.<\/p>\n
No spinning disk translates into a faster response time. Some hosting clients have reported a doubling of site speed when switching from an HDD hosting platform to one that utilized SSDs. Because SDDs can read and write data at the same time (unlike HDDs), this adds a further performance component to these types of servers.<\/p>\n
It should come at no surprise that the lack of a spinning disk in SSDs translates to less power usage. However, you may be surprised to find out just how much less power these solid state drives use: SSDs use 80% less power than conventional hard disk drives.<\/p>\n
With all these benefits, why don\u2019t all hosts offer solid state hosting? The answer has typically been cost\u2014solid state drives have typically been significantly more expensive, but in the past couple of years their cost have come down enough to make them a financially viable choice. The same benefits that customers appreciate \u2014reliability, speed, efficiency \u2014 are also significant benefits to the host operating the servers, so it\u2019s no surprise that more and more hosting platforms are investing in the switch to SSDs.<\/p>\n