SSD drives? Preferred hard drive?

SenseiSteve

SenseiSteve

HD Moderator
Staff member
I'm beginning to see more and more offers being made with SSD drives. Do they cut down on profit margins and if so, is it worth the trade off? Of the three laptops I have at home, one has a SSD and it had to be replaced in less than 30 days.

What are the dynamics to adding SSD drives to offers from both the consumers point of view and the hosting provider?

Is there a preferred hard drive for hosting - one that stands apart from the others?
 
In regards to your laptop at home, that SSD must've been faulty. Samsung SSD's are amazing consumer grade storage solutions and usually come with 5 year warranty's.

From a hosting point of view, a lot of customers now opt for SSD hosting solutions so it's a must for us. I personally prefer SSD's over hard drives in any case for serving larger amounts of customers with less bottleneck.
 
SenseiSteve said:
I'm beginning to see more and more offers being made with SSD drives. Do they cut down on profit margins and if so, is it worth the trade off? Of the three laptops I have at home, one has a SSD and it had to be replaced in less than 30 days.

What are the dynamics to adding SSD drives to offers from both the consumers point of view and the hosting provider?

Is there a preferred hard drive for hosting - one that stands apart from the others?
Click to expand...

Depends upon what your costs are.

SSDs cost more up front to deploy, but you get the following benefits:

1) Lower power consumption (this can been substantial when you are talking hundreds of drives). This is a direct savings on power costs (fewer power feeds).
2) Lower server support costs - lets face it, HDDs are the most commonly swapped component in a server. The less you have to pay for techs time to swap drives, do RAID rebuilds, etc. the more you save.
3) Improved customer satisfaction - this one has a direct $$$ implication. You can charge higher rates for SSD storage, and customers are much much happier with the improved performance.
 
If you spend the extra money on RAM, so you're cached, the 10,000 - 100,000x increase in I/O will blow away the 25-50 times you'll get with SSD.
SSD disks are worth having especially for databases, but you cannot beat ram for speed.
 
SSD drives are the ultimate machines that you can get for your hosting solutions. With a great speed and network speed you can have a reliable hosting server.
 
If your budget is high, then SSD is the best choice because it read/writes data up to 800x times faster as compared to HDD which enhances server response time.
 
SenseiSteve said:
I'm beginning to see more and more offers being made with SSD drives. Do they cut down on profit margins and if so, is it worth the trade off? Of the three laptops I have at home, one has a SSD and it had to be replaced in less than 30 days.

What are the dynamics to adding SSD drives to offers from both the consumers point of view and the hosting provider?

Is there a preferred hard drive for hosting - one that stands apart from the others?
Click to expand...

How is your replaced drive, how long have you had it running? Our shared / reseller servers now use SSD as standard with SSD drives being an optional extra for our VPS servers with a good number opting for them so they're wanted.
 
Actually, I'm now using that laptop as a backup. I will concede it was faster, but I've had zero problems with the other two. I ran it for a few months before adding the third laptop.
 
Steve, the point is that SSD has limited quantity of writing operations, yet unlimited of reading. If this benefit is used correctly - you are the king of the hill. Using SSD for caching along with HDD is a win-win move for us.

SSD caching means putting your hot content on SSD. In this case, a file is read from HDD and written onto SSD only once, after that it is processed from within SSD. This results in tremendous increase of I\O speed, as your server CPU does not have to interact with slow HDD.

On the other hand , using SSD as a main drive is not great. Write limits are exceeded soon and you have to replace a costly SSD and restore the data.

Therefore, I advise you to setup SSD-caching and benefit!
 
We've found that if choosing the right enterprise grade drives, SSDs are the most reliable choices as well. In our extensive usage they are far more reliable that traditional SATA and SAS drives. Of course you also get the benefits of faster read and writes, lower power consumption, and the ability to use small chassis' as well in some cases.

The main limitation of SSDs right now is if you need a great deal of storage at a fairly low cost. In that case traditional drives or a mass storage system like a SAN or NAS are likely still the way to go.
 
SSDs are significantly faster compared to standard mechanical drives. Also, enterprise grade SSDs are much better then consumer SSDs, and when it comes to hosting, using enterprise grade SSDs is a must because they have a higher endurance level, contain power loss data protection features and are designed to provide a consistent level of performance.
 
SenseiSteve said:
I'm beginning to see more and more offers being made with SSD drives. Do they cut down on profit margins and if so, is it worth the trade off? Of the three laptops I have at home, one has a SSD and it had to be replaced in less than 30 days.

What are the dynamics to adding SSD drives to offers from both the consumers point of view and the hosting provider?

Is there a preferred hard drive for hosting - one that stands apart from the others?
Click to expand...

They are much faster, we have always used one with a big high end hard drive or raid system. I noticed they are getting up to 500gb for a reasonable price. If they can get to 750 or 1tb for less than $300 each we will probable migrate over to all SSD. They are not as reliable as the high end hard drives now though, but that is just a matter of time. By not having movable parts eventually they will be much more reliable.

We do have more ssd drives fail than hard drives as of now.
 
Apart from loads speeds being faster the great thing about them is,their is less chance of them failing as there are no mechanical parts in them.
 
LarsJ said:
Any of you guys use hybrid storage? SSD in hard drive enclosures?
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Hybrid Hard Drives are usually standard SATA drives with a small amount of flash storage built in (8-16GB is common I believe). Newer hybrid drives are suppose to monitor the data being read from the hard drive, and cache the most frequently accessed bits to the high-speed NAND flash memory. The data stored on the NAND will change over time, but once the most frequently accessed bits of data are stored on the flash memory, they will be served from the flash, resulting in SSD-like performance for your most-used files.

This may be an okay alternative in consumer applications but in enterprise grade appliances such as servers, these types of drives are probably best avoided. Its better to go with divide and conquer approach (SSD's + SATA Drives) than an all in one approach.
 
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