Intel S3500 SSD vs 15k SAS HDD

dedicated-serverhostingmagentossd

I have recently been thinking of requesting SSD Drives from my hosting provider however its a $300 per month upgrade for 4 x 300GB Intel S3500 SSD's

My hosting company told me they do not use SSD because they did not see a significant change in performance over their 15k SAS HDD drives.

I am hosting a magento website with around 100k products. The dedicated server I am on has Dual Hex Core Processors, 24 GB of DDR3-RDIMM 1333MHz Ram, 15K SAS HHD's in RAID 10, and a CDN network. Paying about 479 per month.

I would like to know your opinions if the SSD drives would show noticeable performance gains and if it warrants 300 per month?

Best Answer

My hosting company told me they do not use SSD because they did not see a significant change in performance over their 15k SAS HDD drives.

They are drunk, idiots, on drugs or simply used a benchmark making little sense or being too specific (like a web server that will not see a large difference - compared to a databsae server for example). A lot depends on the usage scenario - but it makes a generic answer like the one given to you meaningless.

I would like to know your opinions if the SSD drives would show noticeable performance gains and if it warrants 300 per month?

You tell us. Basically - are you IO limited or not? Any OS worth a cent or nothing (i.e. open source) can measure IO load. If you are IO limited then yes ,the gain will be brutal - we talk of a factor of 100 times more IO as a guideline for a decent SSD (and that is a low number) a 15k SAS disc is measured at IIRC 450 IOPS... 45K IOPS are not exactly stellar for a SSD, and you can go up beyond 200k.

Virtualization - yes. Databases - possibly. But not sure your tiny setup (100k products are not exactly a large database) hits here. Can be you serve it all out of memory anyway.

Basically a semi competent admin has to make an evaluation - it is possibly the benefit will be extremely, it is possible the benefit will be hardly something to measure. Totally depends where your bottleneck is now.

I replaced a RAID of 10k SAS HDD in a Raid 10 (8 of them) with a Raid 50 of 6 SSD and the throughput jumped. But then this is a 3tb database that at times does heavy analysis - with just 48gb memory as a buffer. Use cases matter extremely here.

OTOH I also use SSD generally as boot discs on workstations on computers - it does make a difference during patch days and a small SSD is not exactly that expensive (and yes, you likely do get ripped off).

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