How To Choose The Best Data Storage For Your Hosted Server

What type of data storage solution suits my business needs? Should I go with Solid State Drives (SSD) when looking for a dedicated server, cloud virtual machine or should I choose good old H.D.D or maybe I should utilize NVMe. In this blog, I briefly go over some of the data storage available in the market.

 

Hard Disk Drive (HDD): for a long time – since the 1980s – HDD dominated the computer market. HDD uses rotating magnetic disk to store data and these days Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) interface is used for transferring data to and from the HDD. Some the advantages of choosing HDD is, It is cheap, has high data storage capacity (several terabytes) and longer life spam in respect to the number of reads and writes cycles. HDD drives are ideal for data storage.

 

Solid State Drive (SSD): it is much faster than HDD because unlike HHD it has no moving mechanical parts and it utilizes flash memory for storage. SSD drives connect to a server using SATA cable and use the same controller as HDD. Theoretically, you can get a data transfer rate of 600 MB/s more than 10 times faster than average HDD.

 

M2. SSD Non-Volatile Memory express (NVMe): SSD drives are capable of offering blistering Input/output Operation per Second (IOPS) for some time but due to inherent limitations of SATA and AHCI the maximum data transfer speed was capped at 600 MB/s. in order to overcome the data transfer bottleneck, engineers designed a new protocol specifically for SSD drives called Non-Volatile Memory express (NVMe). M2. SSD drives use flash memory for storage, it uses PCI Express (much faster interconnect than SATA) and takes advantage of NVMe technology; as a result, you can hit the data transfer rate of 3 GB/s. this storage solution is ideal for Big Data projects or projects that require a very high IOPS however for an average user you will not notice much difference between SSD and M2.SSA NVMe.