Device reliability
Equipment with moving parts fail, and this is the case with hard drives too. Mechanical devices rarely function forever across the board, device by device. Different variables can contribute to failure rates, including heat and load factors. As much as rack mounted machines are not subject to movement and vibration the way desktops and laptops are, heat and high server loads plus the round-the-clock requirements of servers can mean that hard drives fail fairly frequently in server scenarios.

SSD vs HDD: solid state is more reliable, but not infallible
We know the solid state drives do not have a problem with moving parts. Another reason why SSDs perform better than hard drives in terms of reliability is the fact that SSDs respond to requests faster, like we said – up to 20 times faster. This means a solid state drive is less likely to be overloaded by requests. Equipment that is frequently strained can eventually lead to mechanical failure.

However SSDs have a different, unique problem not faced by hard drives. An SSD can deliver missed writes and bit errors if a specific sector of an SSD is read into frequently. This is due to something called electron tunnelling, but this problem can be mitigated by the firmware on an SSD. In fact, SSDs have come a long way as various SSD-specific issues have slowly been eliminated in large part due to firmware.

What do the benchmarks say?
Well the best way to judge HDD vs SSD in terms of reliability is to look at the benchmarks. Hard drives would typically fail at a rate of 3.5 out of 100 throughout the lifetime of the device. SSD’s would fail at a rate of 0.5 out of 100. That’s a seven-fold difference.

The high failure rates of HDDs are the reason why RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) storage has become so important over time. With RAID data is mirrored across drives so that if a single drive fails the data is not lost, instead the data can be rebuilt on a new drive.

Compensating for device failure – necessary for both SSDs and HDDs
Almost every virtual host will use RAID on their machines to ensure that their customer data is safe if a physical drive fails. RAID quickly becomes complicated and can be expensive to implement where a company has multiple data centres distributed around the country, and where data is stored offsite.

However for most hosting plans that are sold retail RAID will not be something the customer needs to worry about. The host will take care of RAID concerns. It is only clients who make use of private cloud or cluster service that are elastic who will need to be concerned about which RAID regime they will implement. This also goes for managing the overall backup strategy as dedicated hosting and private cloud solutions require real disaster planning to mitigate system crashes and hardware failures.

Devices speeds and the impact on hosting
Easily the primary factor for choosing an SSD over an HDD in the hosting scenario is speed, and that’s the case especially where web hosting is concerned. The reason for this is the high transaction volume and hence high number of disk access requests generated by web hosting. However, from a practical perspective, it is only websites which experience high loads or where hosts try to pack a lot of websites into a shared hosting environment. Here website owners will really lose out if they sign up with a hosting plan that puts high server loads on hard drives, this will put their sites at a competitive disadvantage.

Mitigating the problems with hard drive speeds
Of course, web hosts can do a lot to mitigate problems around hard drive performance and they often do so to enable the ongoing use of hard drives, which in turn reduces the costs associated with hosting. For example, a host can choose to store data-intensive applications like MySQL on hardware with solid state drives, while serving media files from a hard drive-based machine.

Using file caching based on reverse-proxy is another option, alongside load balancing to take the load off a single machine and its individual hard drives. With multiple copies of the same website running a host can manage demand in a way that hard drives can cope with. Thanks to load balancing traffic is routed to machines with a lower load so legacy hard drive-based servers can provide reasonable response times.

There are more factors, of course. A content delivery network or can also bypass hard drive performance shortcomings, and so can the use of caching and virtual RAM. Web hosts usually manage domain services for companies so they can run DNS requests, which require fast responses, through a machine that uses SSDs. On the flipside the host can put websites with little traffic on legacy machines that makes use of hard drives.

In fact, many hosting plans include CDN as an option because it is so effective at mitigating slow hosting speeds where hard drives are the culprit. That said, nowadays hosts also offer solid state hosting as a benefit above CDN, even if this is more expensive and effectively premium-priced. All that said, it’s not uncommon that a basic shared hosting solution will be relegated to hard drive-based servers.

SSDs count for overall performance
Particularly where virtual RAM solutions are used in shared hosting accounts to boost RAM available to content management system (CMS)-driven sites, hosts must make SSDs available to customers in their hardware to ensure the CMS systems run fast. Hard drives can result in slow response times. Many hosting companies have opted to offer cloud virtual hosting plans which are based on SSD hardware to ensure customers get better performance, but these would come at a higher cost than the host’s equivalent HDD-based hosting solution.

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https://naijawebhost.com/