Servers 101: What is an SSD? | ServerMonkey

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Servers 101 - What is an SSD?


What are SSDs? – Solid State Drives

In terms of speed, reliability, and form factor, an SSD is the reigning champion when it comes to accessing and retrieving data. Instead of storing data via magnetic storage, a solid state drive stores data with flash memory which is more efficient at reading and writing data.

A typical SSD will outperform a hard drive by 100 times or more depending on the SSD. To put that into perspective, a rendering program would take about an hour to render an entire video with a traditional HDD while an SSD could do it in less than half the time!

In terms of capacity, SSDs have been growing and can now accommodate a whopping 1TB of data! Although there are some companies that have created in the realm of 60TBs!

Due to its small size and light weight, SSDs are excellent for longevity, power consumption, and noise. You can stick them to pretty much any surface since they’re about ¼ the size of a traditional HDD. It also has no moving parts, which entails less corruption of data, no noise and less power consumption.

As prices for SSDs continue to drop and more businesses switch over to them, you can expect them to become the standard for enterprises and servers.


Which is better, an SSD or HDD?

Short answer: An SSD is well worth the cost and benefits to set up for any sized business.
Long answer: It depends.

In the past, the cost of HDDs outweighed the benefits of SSDs. But these days it’s starting to turn around.

For servers, an SSD will ensure that your office or business can access applications at blazing speeds. But if your business requires a lot of reading and writing heavy data sets, then a traditional HDD would benefit you more.

Other things to think about are costs. If looking strictly at power consumption, an SSD has no moving parts and is a lot more efficient at storing data. This will lower the costs of running RAID configurations for IT professionals. In the event of needing repairs, the lack of mechanical parts makes the repair process for SSDs quicker and more cost-effective.

Although if you are looking at options for massive amounts of storage, a traditional HDD with backups could make up for the amount of solid state drives you would need for the same amount of storage.

Do you need an SSD? - The Takeaways

If you need read and write speeds, SSDs are the best choice.

If capacity is your main concern, traditional HDDs are the better option.

For price, HDDs are better on a pure specs-to-cost ratio, though for a mix of speed and cost, SSDs can be very affordable as well.

Companies such as Intel and Samsung have gone through extensive testing to bring about the best solid state drives for enterprise infrastructures with performance and reliability.

At ServerMonkey, we carry enterprise and consumer level SSDs from Intel and Samsung.

We will also help you out with this choice by offering you all the best SSD and HDD options on every server we offer. Whether you want a low-end SCSI machine or a high-end rackmount full of HDDs and SSDs ServerMonkey can accommodate you!

If you have any further questions on Solid State Drives, contact our experts at 1-866-590-8098 and we’ll be happy to answer all your questions. You can also contact us online at https://www.servermonkey.com/contact.

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