It’s 2020, and you may have heard of this new term, NVMe SSDs
NVMe SSDs are a type of storage like a traditional Hard Drive ( HDD ) and SATA SSD ( Sata Solid State Drive ). NVMe SSDs are newer & faster than HDDs and SSDs.
This post will briefly describe each storage device, it’s major differences, and how it affects web hosting.
What is a HDD, SATA SSD, and NVMe SSD
HDDs are mechanical hard drives, the old spinning disks that was present in your old PC/laptop from a decade ago. They were really slow, and they still are slow.
SSDs are solid state drives, there are no spinning parts to read data, and thus are faster than HDDs. SATA SSDs connect to the motherboard via SATA.
NVMe SSDs are SSDs directly connected to the motherboard. So this enables even faster reads and faster writes than a SATA SSD. How much faster ? Let’s look at the graph below
Hard Drives peak at reads/writes of data at around 100 – 170 MB per second, SATA SSDs are at 500-600 MB per second while NVMes can peak at a whopping 3000+ MB/s. So a SATA SSD is around 5x faster than a Hard drive, while an NVMe Drive is almost 30x faster than a Hard drive !
Above is another graph. An average seek time of a data. A hard drive takes about 2 MS to find a data, a SATA SSD around 0.2 MS while an NVMe takes around 0.02 MS to find a data. That’s over 100x faster than a hard drive !
Hard Drives fail often, at a 2 percent rate per annum
Hard drives fail at a 1.89% rate per annum according to this report from BackBlaze
So why do people still use hard drives, even though it is reportedly slower, and have higher failure rates ? It’s because it’s a lot cheaper than SSDs.
What type of hosting should I choose ? HDD, SSDs or NVMe SSDs ?
Many hosts offer multiple solutions. For file storage, HDD is fine, but if you are hosting a WordPress website, an eCommerce site, a forum, you should at least look into SSD/NVMe SSDs options.
Mosts hosts now offer at least SSD solutions, but as shown above, NVMe SSDs are a lot faster at reading and writing data, which will result in a better hosting experience for the user, and future visitors of the website.
At HostKoala, most of our servers are on NVMe SSDs in RAID 1, while some older locations are still on SATA SSDs to ensure that our end users websites are snappy and fast ! You can contact support at support[at]hostkoala[dot]com to ask about our server specifications, and we will get back to you as soon as possible !
