A solid-state drive (SSD) is a media that uses flash modules so as to save data. The solid-state drives are still relatively new and more pricey compared to standard hard disk drives (HDD), but they're faster, so they are quite often used for Operating Systems and apps on both personal computers and web hosting servers. An SSD is recommended as it doesn't have spinning disks that restrict its speed and can even cause overheating as it may happen with an HDD. Lots of companies use SSDs for caching purposes, so any site content which is accessed more frequently will be kept on this type of drives, while all the other content will be held on conventional HDDs. The reason to use this type of a configuration is to balance the cost and performance of their Internet hosting platform and to minimize the load on the HDDs resulting from countless reading and writing processes.
SSD with Data Caching in Hosting
The cloud platform where we create hosting accounts uses only SSD drives, so your web apps and static sites will open very quickly. The SSDs are used for files, emails and databases, so regardless of whether you open a page or check for new e-mail messages using webmail, the content will load promptly. In order to offer even higher speeds, we also use a number of dedicated SSDs that work only as cache. All of the content that generates lots of traffic is copied on them automatically and is later on read from them and not from the main storage drives. Of course, that content is replaced dynamically for improved performance. What we achieve in this way aside from the improved speed is decreased overall load, thus lower chance of hardware failures, and longer lifespan of the main drives, which is one more level of protection for any information that you upload to your account.
SSD with Data Caching in Semi-dedicated Servers
All semi-dedicated server accounts that we provide are made on a cloud platform which uses only SSD drives. We don't use HDDs any longer, so your websites will load very quickly as we use SSDs for each part of the service - files, databases and e-mails. Considering that some users may host sites which can be more popular than others, we also use many drives for caching. Our system identifies any content that is loaded more frequently and copies 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 influence the performance of the other Internet sites that are stored on the very same primary drive. Using caching drives also raises the life-span of the main storage SSDs and decreases the potential for disk failures.