A solid-state drive (SSD) is a media which uses flash modules to store information. The solid-state drives remain relatively new and more expensive when compared to classic hard disk drives (HDD), yet they are much faster, so they are quite often employed for Operating Systems and apps on both personal computers and servers. An SSD is preferred as it does not have spinning disks which limit its speed and may even cause overheating like it may happen with an HDD. A number of companies work with SSDs for caching purposes, so any content which is accessed more frequently will be stored on this type of drives, while all the other content will be located on standard HDDs. The main reason to use this kind of a configuration is to balance the cost and performance of their hosting platform and to decrease the load on the HDDs resulting from intense reading and writing processes.
SSD with Data Caching in Hosting
The cloud platform where we make hosting accounts uses exclusively SSD drives, so your web apps and static sites will load very quickly. The SSDs are used for files, e-mails and databases, so regardless of whether you load a page or check for new messages through webmail, the content will load right away. To offer even greater speeds, we also use numerous dedicated SSDs which function only as cache. All the 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. Needless to say, that content is replaced dynamically for improved performance. What we achieve in this way apart from the improved speed is decreased overall load, thus lower potential for hardware failures, and prolonged lifespan of the primary drives, that's one more level of protection for any information that you upload to your account.
SSD with Data Caching in Semi-dedicated Hosting
All semi-dedicated hosting accounts that we offer are generated on a cloud platform which employs solely SSD drives. We do not use HDDs any longer, so your Internet sites will load quickly because we employ SSDs for every aspect of the service - files, databases and e-mails. As some users may host websites that can be more frequently visited than others, we also use many drives for caching. Our system discovers all the content that is loaded more frequently and duplicates 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 sites will not affect the performance of the rest of the sites which are stored on the same main drive. Using caching drives also raises the lifespan of the main storage SSDs and decreases the probability of disk failures.