Solid state drives (SSDs) boost businesses’ ability to support critical applications by enhancing the read and write speed of the HDDs that came before them. They’re the answer to enterprise workloads that most companies, particularly those whose disk-based storage suffers, crave.

With their low energy consumption, reduced overall cost of ownership, and the sheer performance power, InnoGrit Corporation reports that the SSD is the modern-day hero of the storage sphere.

SSDs Out-Perform Even the Fastest HDDs

The quickest hard drive is 15,000 RPM. But even though it’s impressive, it can’t hold a candle to NAND flash SSDs.

Non-volatile memory express-based SSDs have top speeds 20 to 40 times faster than hard drives. And they have physics to thank for that. Hard drives contain mechanical components that are in constant motion. As such, they break down more frequently than SSDs that have no mechanical elements.

Solid state drives use electricity instead of read heads and mechanical arms to produced data storage responses, with faster performance meaning quicker boot times and data movement.

Yet, Boasts Decreased Energy Consumption

At first glance, some may believe that all this speed comes with extra energy consumption, but this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Since HDDs come with moving parts, they require more energy to run than the small amounts of electricity flowing through SSD memory cells. The latter also avoids high heat that typically generates in the hundreds of spinning disks whirring away inside data centers.

The direct and indirect energy reduction effects are especially beneficial for organizations hosting numerous expansive data centers, all of which necessitate maintenance and energy. Decreasing the energy consumption, HVAC, and climate control costs through SSD usage improves the businesses’ overall sustainability.

More Expensive Than HDDs, But Reduced Overall Cost of Ownership

A Forrester Research/Micron survey of IT decision makers noted that 48% of those who haven’t started using SSDs said cost was the main barrier to adoption. But despite being costlier than HDDs initially, they reduce total cost of ownership in a number of ways:

Simplified Designs and Reduced Drives

The boosted storage capacity and application capability of solid state drives help enterprises reduce the system number they need, limiting cluster size and cutting complexity, simultaneously making things easier to manage and support. They enable:

• Higher per-node capacity (14 TB with HDDs to over 22 TB with SSDs).
• Better IOPS.
• Fewer nodes to store data, making the design simpler.
• Lower operating costs, even though the initial price to purchase is higher per drive.

Minimized Energy Costs

As mentioned above, solid state drives require less energy, despite their speediness, thanks to the lack of moving parts.

Lowered Software License Costs

SSDs provide more IOPS per node, alongside higher bandwidth. As such, they help utilize the full potential of the existing nodes. For most businesses, it allows them to do the same work with fewer nodes.

With an all-SSD design, node numbers are kept to a minimum and the software license costs are diminished if they pay on a per-node basis.