A solid-state drive (SSD) improves the performance of any application running on it when compared with a classic hard-disk drive (HDD). The reason is that a solid-state drive functions with multiple interconnected flash memory modules, so there're no physical parts to move. In comparison, a hard-disk drive contains spinning disks and each reading or writing process causes the disks to move, which means that the speed of an HDD is restricted. Since the prices of the two types of drives are different as well, a large number of desktops and web servers are provided with an SSD for the operating system and random applications, and an HDD for data storage, in this way balancing price and overall performance. A hosting service provider may also use a solid-state drive for caching purposes, so files that are used frequently will be stored on this type of a drive for accomplishing higher loading speeds and for limiting the reading/writing processes on the HDDs.
SSD with Data Caching in Cloud Hosting
The cloud platform where we create cloud hosting accounts uses solely SSD drives, so your web apps and static sites will open very quickly. The SSDs are used for files, emails and databases, so regardless of whether you open a page or check for new messages through webmail, the content will load instantly. In order to ensure even better speeds, we also use a group of dedicated SSDs that work only as cache. All content which generates lots of traffic is copied on them automatically and is later read from them and not from the main storage drives. Needless to say, that content is replaced dynamically for better efficiency. What we achieve this way apart from the improved speed is decreased overall load, thus lower possibility of hardware failures, and longer lifespan of the primary drives, which is one more level of protection for any data that you upload to your account.