A solid-state drive is substantially faster than any regular hard disk. The reason is that an HDD works by using spinning disks, that can rotate only so fast and the more info is read and written, the sluggish and warmer they get, whereas an SDD uses modules of flash memory, therefore there are no physically moving components. The access speeds for an SSD are substantially higher, which makes this type of drives a recommended solution if speed is needed. That's why SSDs are in many cases employed for the Operating System on a PC and for keeping data that is accessed regularly on web servers. A lot of providers also use a combination of the two drives, so they keep the data on hard-disks, but they use a couple of solid-state drives to cache the more frequently used data and as a result, the data loads a lot faster while the load on the HDDs is decreased because their disks have to spin less frequently in order to read and write.
SSD with Data Caching in Shared Website Hosting
The cloud platform where we create shared website hosting accounts uses solely SSD drives, so your web applications and static Internet sites will load very fast. The SSDs are used for files, email addresses and databases, so no matter if you open a page or check for new email messages through webmail, the content will load promptly. In order to offer even better speeds, we also use multiple dedicated SSDs that function only as cache. Any content that generates a lot of traffic is copied on them automatically and is afterwards read from them and not from the primary storage drives. Of course, that content is replaced dynamically for improved efficiency. What we achieve that way except for the improved speed is decreased overall load, thus decreased possibility of hardware failures, and extended lifespan of the primary drives, that is one more level of protection for any data that you upload to your account.