The hardest part of choosing a new server, whether it’s a dedicated server or virtual private server, is the selection of the right hardware that will fit your needs. If you’re like most people, then you try to purchase maximum CPU cores for your budget. You also check how much RAM you’ll get. You’re cautious about having enough storage capacity. But there is one crucial element that most people forget – the storage type.
Not all drives are made equal. There is a huge difference in price and
performance between NVMe, SSD and HDD storage. In this article, we’ll guide you
through different types of drives so that you can pick the best one for you.
HDD, SSD, NVMe: From Spinning Platters to
Lightning-fast Express Drive
HDD: Hard Disk Drives
The oldest of them
all, hard disk drives (HDD), is the only one of three based on moving parts – spinning
platters and moving needles, recording data on different sectors of the metal
disc. The technology itself goes way back to the 50s, when it was introduced by
IBM. Although cheapest on the list, they’re also slowest when it comes to
read-write operations. Most HDDs can’t exceed maximal S-ATA II speed of ~270
MB/s. HDD is the ultimate solution in case you want to store your data for as
little money as possible. But you’ll have to wait more when reading/writing
data. Although slower, they’re still popular. Our customers can still encounter
HDD drives in Storage VPS or
while configurating Dedicated Servers.
Capacity of storage
varies greatly, but most drives range somewhere between hundreds of Gigabytes
to few Terabytes. In case of virtual instances, we at Contabo offer hard disk
space starting from 300 GB.
Home users are sometimes concerned about HDDs’ sensibility to outside shocks or
sudden movements. But that’s not really a concern in the case of data centers,
because servers are fixed to racks or shelves and not moved around.
