Written by: Daniel Nicolitz, DentalPC, Chief Technology Officer
Summary: You want Business Class Solid State Drives in your Server.
Storage of data in a computer is measured in bytes (Mega, Giga, Tera, Peta), but more than just the volume of data, the container you choose to put it in makes a huge difference.
The traditional spinning hard drive (HDD) is the basic nonvolatile storage on a computer. That is, information on it doesn't "go away" when you turn off the system, as is the case with data stored in RAM. A read/write head on an arm accesses the data while the platters are spinning. It is basically mechanical.
A solid-state drive (SSD) does functionally everything a hard drive does, but data is instead stored on interconnected flash memory chips that retain the data even when there's no power present. These flash memory chips are like USB thumb drives, but are typically much faster and more reliable. SSDs are consequently more expensive than USB thumb drives of the same capacities.
SSD’s are fast, real fast. Like 80x faster than a HDD in IOPS (input/output operations per second). Your business database will run much faster on SSD. You can easily see why the popularity of SSD in personal laptops, tablets and smartphones (whether you realized they were installed or not) has dramatically changed the overall system performance landscape.
SSD’s are expensive. Typically, 5-7 times more expensive than HDD in $/GB. Your typical size SSD is still less than 1TB, while HDD’s recently surpassed the 10TB barrier.
SSD’s also wear out, unlike a traditional hard drive that dies of mechanical failure, and SSD’s flash memory chips “wear out” over many repeated write cycles. Vendors express this endurance in terabytes written (TBW) and Drive writes per Day (DWPD).
Consumer level SSD do not have the same “endurance” as Business class SSD. So many times, a Business Class SSD will cost a lot more than a consumer level drive.
Contact DentalPC to see how we can leverage SSD’s in your Business.