SSD vs HDD: Difference. Advantages. What to choose for hosting a website?

First and foremost – let’s not make this a battle – because it’s not. We will explore the difference between SSDs and HDDs, and give our recommendations and commentary regarding the differences, advantages and technology comparisons.

Overview of HDD and SSD technology

An HDD (or Hard Disk Drive) can be best imagined as a vinyl player for your computer. It consists of a metal disc with magnetic coating that records your data. Like a vinyl, your computer has a reading arm that hovers over the spinning hard disk – allowing for that data to be read, transferred and displayed on your computer. The faster the disk spins, the faster it can perform – but all of this causes heat an friction – eventually heating up your computer.

The SSD (or Solid State Drives) offer the same function of the HDD but at a greater level of efficiency. SSDs are essentially flash memory chips. Being that they are chips require no power to “spin up,” SSDs are more flexible in size – allowing for companies such as Apple to take advantage of them and come out with such products like the Mac Book Air.

As an analogy to sum up the difference: Let’s assume you live on a large lake, and you need to get to the other side. Would it be faster to row across with one paddle, or to take a motor boat? In this analogy, think of the row boat as the HDD, and the motor boat as the SSD. Sure you can row across, but the more you row, the more tired you get; whereas with the motor boat, all you need to do is crank up the power.

Tech Specs of SSD and HDD: At a glance

Now don’t be confused. SSDs are not a whole bunch of flash drives (or thumb drives) that have been pasted together on a circuit board. The circuitry of the SSDs is much more complex. But avoiding the techno-speak, the essential explanation is that SSD are large memory chips that don’t fragment their data.

The Fragmentation of data on an HDD works as it did in our vinyl analogy. Because your files are stored on a disc, and are written on the magnets covering those disks, retrieving that data takes a longer to recover. Whereas SSDs don’t pay attention to where the data is stored. It seems like HDDs are more organized in this sense by being spun in one area – but when you have a really large file that can fit in on one disk, you scatter your data. This make s retrieving that data take longer. SSDs don’t do this as they store in what some compare to as a “cloud” memory.

Speaking of finding files, let’s speak to the file opening, copying, and writing speak of both storage units. Quite plainly, SSDs open, copy, and write files starting at 200MB per second. HDDs max out somewhere around 120MB per second. Speed is won in this round by SSDs because they don’t have to deal with the spin up of discs or the aforementioned fragmentation.

Speed is great if you’re running Photoshop and need to complete numerous small tasks, or if you’re running a simple website.

We mentioned friction before, so let’s talk about i. Well, think about it. A moving disc that has to spin up to retrieve your files is going to conduct heat – it’s just physics. Especially will that disc spin faster with the more functions that your HDD is told to do. Spinning causing friction which causes heat. Might not heat up your home during winter, but for a confined space like the bottom of your laptop locked in on two sides with 2 plastic panels – well let’s just say you’re looking at a hot-top instead of a laptop.

What does that mean for you vs. a commercial server? Well, more energy is one. The more your computer works, the more fans it needs to be cooled down. The hotter it gets, the slower it works. ON a desktop level while playing your favorite games – this should be fine with all the standard features.

But if you’re running a server, or hosting websites on that server as a company, you bet your ass you’re going to need something that doesn’t heat up as fast which would in turn slow down your clients’ websites and increase downtime.

Let’s get Physical

Remember that HDDs are spinning discs. They physically (and literally – hey, why not both!) spin. So when there is a natural disturbance (not in the force but on your system), it might affect the hard-drive.

Ex. You’re sitting on your couch and surfing the web on your laptop. You move to plug in the charger and accidently drop your laptop. Your first worry is the screen! “Oh no!” Once you pick it up and see that nothing happened you blow out a sigh of relief. But you’re not thinking of the spinning disks that have shaken up, cracked, and even bent. That’s one f the caveats of the HDD.

SSDs are solid state memory chips as we’ve discussed – they don’t spin or move. They are more secure to natural phenomenon and the occasional butterfingers that all computer users have.

Magneto!

One feature that you hear a lot when SSDs and HDDs are compared is about the magnetic coating on a spinning discs and their sensitivity to magnets. Assuming you’re not present with your laptop in the vicinity of an EMP or you don’t stick your computer in an MRI machine – you should be fine.

Q.B.D! Quick.Break.Down

Buying 1 TB of space:
For an SSD, costs around $250
For an HHD, costs around $50
The HDD is the obvious economically friendly buy.

SSD vs HDD: Summary

Even though the price of SSDs has been falling, the price per gigabyte advantage is still strongly with HDDs. Yet, if performance and fast bootup is your primary consideration and money is secondary, then SSD is the way to go.

No “buts,” or “although,” or versus in this section. Simply put, HDDs are your economical “go-to” when the question of data storage are in question. SSDs are the champions when it comes to speed, performance, and are the more expensive option. In the end, it’s all about what you need more. To operate a lot of small tasks at the same time? Then go with SSDs. If you’re looking to operate your computer using a lot of programs and files, and want to stay within budget, go with HDDs.

SSD in Web Hosting Industry

As long as our web site is mostly related to web hosting, let us consider SSD and HDD discs applicable to the industry i.e. when they are used in web servers designed to host a website. As it was mentioned above, when it is about your own web server (dedicated server hosting) everything finally comes to the price of disks and the performance you’d like to achieve using either SSDs or HDD disks on your web server.

However, when it comes to shared web hosting or VPS hosting the price that hosting companies offer for SSD hosting is not usually significantly more than the price of HDD hosting, so that might be a good idea to choose web hosting with SSD disk support for web sites that do many read-writes to the drive i.e. e.g. database driven sites such as forums, blogs, Joomla based sites, e-commerce sites, etc.

In order to try to host your web site on SSD discs, we’d suggest to try the following hosting companies that offer website hosting with SSD disks support at quite affordable prices:

• InMotion Hosting (visit website)
  They offer hosting for business websites, VPS hosting, dedicated servers;
• Web Hosting Hub (visit website)
  They offer hosting for personal websites, WordPress & Joomla hosting..

and you might want to check other providers that we’d suggest to consider at
the best web hosting page: https://www.prchecker.info/top-10-web-hosting.php