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Drive types and hosting speed: HDD, SSD, NVMe

This article is 5 years old — prices and terms may have changed.

Drive types and hosting speed: HDD, SSD, NVMe

One of the criteria when choosing hosting is the type of drive used in the servers. The difference between HDD, SSD and NVMe disk subsystems is considerable, and the most important characteristics of each are worth weighing up.

Drive standards

Today hosting providers use drives belonging to three main standards in their server hardware: HDD, SSD and NVMe.

  1. HDD — magnetic drives of an older generation, in use since 1990. Their data transfer rate depends on how fast the magnetic platter spins and reaches 150 MB/s. For relatively recent HDDs rated at 7200 revolutions per minute the rate can reach 180–220 MB/s. Besides the low speed, the drawbacks of an HDD include a high noise level and high power consumption.
  2. SSD — solid-state drives with no moving parts. They work quietly, consume less power than an HDD and deliver data transfer rates of up to 1100 MB/s. The main drawback of an SSD is the limited number of write cycles — up to ten thousand. Recovering deleted information is also harder.
  3. NVMe — essentially the same SSD, but built for a different interface: PCI Express instead of the standard SATA. All the advantages of an SSD are kept, while the data transfer rate reaches 3 GB/s. Its own protocol (originally developed by Intel) lets NVMe drives cope better with a large number of simultaneous requests.

Which subsystem suits which task?

How each disk subsystem works determines where it is used. The simplest case is the rather slow HDD: a low transfer rate severely limits the range of tasks such servers can handle even adequately. Servers with HDDs will hold backups, large archives of data, and sites for which read speed is not a key parameter.

SSDs are more universal — first of all because they are modern and fast. Commercial resources, online shops above all, are most often placed on SSD servers.

NVMe, being a refined and faster take on the SSD, suits those tasks as well. More than that, NVMe servers give fast access to online shops with large catalogues and a high number of simultaneous requests.

Any high-load commercial and information services are also moved to NVMe: that keeps the speed even at peak load.

NVMe hosting from Host4Biz: the advantages

We use NVMe drives in our own servers. The reasons are plain enough:

  1. Fast drives let us guarantee that sites on our hosting load instantly and stay responsive.
  2. NVMe's ability to handle many simultaneous requests keeps a resource stable even at maximum user activity.

When choosing hosting for WordPress or for any other resource, it is worth considering the hardware the hosting provider uses. From our own experience we can say that only the most modern technology — NVMe-based servers among it — lets a resource run at maximum speed. And a site's speed is an advantage both for its visitors and for the algorithms that decide search rankings.