A solid-state drive is significantly faster than any conventional hard-disk drive. The reason is that a hard-disk drive works by using rotating disks, which can rotate only so fast and the more info is read and written, the slower and warmer they become, whereas an SDD employs modules of flash memory, hence there aren't any physically moving components. The access speeds for an SSD are significantly higher, which makes this kind of drives a preferred solution when speed is needed. That's why SSDs are in many cases used for the Operating System on a laptop or computer and for storing data that is used frequently on web servers. Numerous service providers also use a combination of both drives, so they save the data on hard-disks, but they use a couple of SSDs to cache the more often used data and due to this fact, the data loads a lot faster while the load on the HDDs is reduced because their disks need to spin less often to read and write.
SSD with Data Caching in Shared Website Hosting
The cloud platform where we create shared website hosting accounts uses only SSD drives, so your web applications and static websites will open extremely fast. The SSDs are used for files, emails and databases, so no matter if you open a page or check for new emails with webmail, the content will load promptly. To ensure even greater speeds, we also use a group of dedicated SSDs which function only as cache. Any content which generates lots of traffic is copied on them automatically and is afterwards read from them and not from the main storage drives. Of course, that content is replaced dynamically for improved efficiency. What we achieve in this way in addition to the improved speed is decreased overall load, thus decreased possibility of hardware failures, and extended lifespan of the main drives, which is one more level of protection for any data that you upload to your account.
SSD with Data Caching in Semi-dedicated Servers
All semi-dedicated server accounts that we provide are created on a cloud platform that uses only SSD drives. We do not use HDDs any longer, so your sites will load quickly since we employ SSDs for each aspect of the service - files, databases and e-mails. Considering that some people may host websites which could be more popular than others, we also use numerous drives for caching. Our system discovers any content which is loaded more often and copies it on these drives in order to load it from them. This configuration is used for load-balancing purposes as we make sure that several reading/writing intensive Internet sites will not influence the performance of the rest of the websites which are stored on the same primary drive. Using caching drives also raises the lifespan of the main storage SSDs and lowers the chance of disk failures.