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High Capacity HDD vs. Low Capacity SSD
Hello,
We have been offering High Capacity HDD VPS service for a while. Now, we are wondering if it is worth it to provide an SSD option for our customers.
Do you believe all VPS customers need SSD VPS or the demand varies from customer to customer?
SSD vs. HDD
- What VPS option would you buy?63 votes
- Low Capacity SSD VPS46.03%
- High Capacity HDD VPS53.97%
Comments
Try ssd cached
edit: nevermind, misread the question
Amazing, will check this
Hello,
I would buy both i mean it depends on my needs if i want to store data i will need space and price/go will be lower with HDD but if i want to host a eshop for example i will probably need performance so i will prefer SSD.
It also depends how you will size your VPS, you should also ask what is the average space needed ?
Actually I am comparing to top SSD providers like Digital Ocean "20GB SSG for $5" and Linode "24GB SSD for $10" and my offering which is 50GB HDD for less than digital ocean.
Do you have other recommendations?
Do you think everyone puts mustard on their hot dog or it varies from customer to customer?
I see. However, my question can be re-phrased like this:
Is SSD VPS a must and HDD is obsolete?
Or both are currently favored options based on usage requirements?
You answered your question
"based on usage requirements"
For example , if i were to dump or store say DB backups , i would go for HDD as , reads and writes will probably happen only few times a day /ones per day
@arminds so the idea would be to offer something like 15-20 GB SSD ?
If you have very low prices be sure what your customers acutally like the most : space or price ?
speed is great but sometimes space is more important. since we have ssd speed now, I guess nobody want to use slow hhd but huge storage space is needed.
if its me i would have two seperate vps, ssd for website, database and such, hdd for backup and the "cloud" stuff.
For backup/storage only VPS, Regular HDD. But for any other purpose, at least SSD cached.
What about SSD Cached? Where you get the benefit of higher disk space of HDD and the speed of SSD as a caching method?
It will cache commonly used data.
Does it really achieve both requirements "Speed and Space"? Or it has drawbacks?
It all depends on the need of a client. For example, a mid-sized traffic website with a lot of files in it (let's say, a cmd with lot of photos and 4-5K visitors per day) could do fine on a HHD vps, or a backup server can run nicely on HDD having more space.
On the other hand, a really busy database with continuously reads and writes on the disk, should be served on SSD.
In HHD, things are also depending on the configuration (what raid, cluster etc).
And we should not forget that a couple of years or a bit more, SSD disks was rare to LET systems and, despite that, websites was working just fine.
It only improves read speed to the extent that accesses have temporal locality. Usually the OS does a pretty good job of caching that already, but with low-memory full virtualization (Xen/KVM) I could see the use of SSD cache ...
Keep in mind an SSD cache tuned for performance is going to see a -lot- of writes, so be prepared for short lifespan. I really think a lot of "SSD Cached" VPS out there is tuned so that the SSD cache barely ever does anything.
For in general you recommend pure SSD VPS over SSD Cached?
For the record, I recommend optimizing your stack so it runs fine on HDD. On a dedicated server, of course. I don't recommend using VPS at all except for testing.
This is what makes more sense IMO.
SSD cache can work fine and might be a good marketing argument.
If you go this route (or the full ssd one) please get quality ssd if you don't want your drives to die fast.
Most users will be fine with an HDD VPS is that's not too much oversold. SSD is good on a dedicated if you have a database with heavy writes or too much read that you can't cache in RAM, but on a VPS better optimize your web app / cache stuff than rely on a shared SSD.
Just my 2 cents
Just depends on the use case. DB server or something that's I/O heavy - I'm gonna pick pure SSD. Hosting lots of large static assets/backups: HDD (preferably SSD cached).
There's not really 1 option I'd pick every time.. My 2 main dedicated boxes have a mix of SSDs and HDDs - 2x SSDs in RAID 1, 2x HDDs in RAID 1 - and different VMs/assets/etc are hosted on the appropriate storage.
I agree. But couldn't understand the last part. What do you mean your don't recommend using VPS on dedicated server? I mean where else it can be hosted?
Thanks a lot, But how can we define oversold in terms of I/O?
I mean if RAM, CPU and Disk Space are not utilized.
No, I mean I wouldn't recommend a customer to go out and get an HDD-only VPS to run their site on after it's been optimized for HDD. I'd recommend them to get a cheap dedicated server for anything other than testing.
For example, one of the cheaper Kimsufi's are ideal when they are in stock. Failing that, Dacentec or Delimiter.
Aha, I see. Thanks a lot for clarification.
The problem is that most people here like to "dd test" their vpses and might find that the result if too low for them if it's not very high. But in most cases a good setup (good HDD, raid 10) can have RAM as a bottleneck before I/O. It also depends on the plans you are going to offer. (How much RAM for KVM, RAM left on the host if openvz etc) the kernel does a pretty good job at caching things - and that makes reads really fast and uses less your I/O that becomes available for other users that might need it.
Without knowing the users'needs & your setup it's hard to say. As each use has different needs. If it's small sites, not too busy, some file storage etc HDD will be perfect. For many busy websites with databases with either heavy write or not enough RAM for cache then SSD would be better.
Enough RAM for read caching + SSD cache for write (or good RAID card with big cache and BBU?)
Good luck, have fun
Thanks a lot for your detailed and valuable reply.
For example, currently our setup is Xen pv on RAID10 HDD. Most customers are happy with the setup and we always have plenty of RAM and CPU not utilized. However, new customers who are used to SSD performance, find it lower than their needs because of lower I/O OF HDD.
Do they find it lower than their needs using it or testing using dd, ioping and similar tools?
Do you have a good raid card with cache + BBU in the current setup?
If you already tried that and that doesn't help you; you can try to add two good ssd as raid 1 and experiment with ssd caching to see if that fits your needs.
As SSDs are still rather expensive, I'd go that route rather than the full SSD one first, and then see later on if you want to try one full ssd node... The best would probably for you to have to nodes: An hdd one and an SSD one with less storage. So that users can choose what they prefer depending on their needs, and I/O heavy users will go on the SSD node, so the other one will be less busy and will have better perf...
Thanks a lot for your valuable reply. I will definitely consider those options.
HDD route is good if you can restrict per node i/o (which I would recommend even on ssd server but you got bigger room to breathe there) otherwise it quickly becomes the bottleneck and source of potential problems on the server. Restrictions will translate into bad dd results though.
Even digitalocean ssds are overkill with sites low traffic of 200-300 daily. Caching minimises disk io on my vm I have with digitalocean.
Would you please clarify your experience with Digital Ocean? Do you mean even digital Ocean SSD can't serve low traffic sites?
Yes, it will show bad dd results of course.