When searching for a hosting solution for your WordPress website, you’ll probably find that there is a choice between HDD, SSD or NVMe storage drives. Which you opt for can make a huge difference to the performance of your website and in this post, we’ll take a close look at the three technologies and their suitability for WordPress.
Contents
The unique needs of WordPress
Your storage drive is the brain of your server, it’s the place where all the information is kept, including your website software, content and user information. When someone visits your website, the information stored on your drive needs to be sent to your users’ browsers and any information they send back needs to be written to the drive.
The issue for websites is that this needs to be done quickly. The faster the information can be read from or written to the drive, the faster your site can load and respond to user interaction. In the online market, this speed is essential to prevent user abandonment and increase engagement. As search engines use site speed as a ranking criterion, it is also vital for SEO.
For WordPress users, however, speed is even more vital. As WordPress uses a combination of core, theme and plugin software, the amount of data it has to send when loading and responding can make it sluggish. A faster drive helps counteract this sluggishness, ensuring a smooth performance.
Find out how web hosts are using AI, read: The Benefits of AI-Powered Managed WordPress Hosting
HDD drives
HDD drives have been used in computers and servers for decades but are now losing their prominence to SSDs. Similar in concept to compact disks and DVDs, they are spinning metal disks on which digital information can be written, overwritten and read. These actions are carried out by a read/write head, positioned close to the disk’s surface. The disk spins at a rate of around 7,200 RPM and this limitation affects the speed at which data can be processed. This means data-heavy WordPress websites might struggle to perform effectively when using an HDD drive, especially when they are busy.
A well-known weakness of HDD drives is that they need moving mechanical parts in order to spin. Given that at 7,200 RPM, the average disk rotates several billions of times a year, wear is inevitable regardless of the quality of the components. When this happens, the disk can fail and require repair or replacement – a process that can result in downtime or even worse if the data has not been backed up. The average HDD usually lasts between 3 to 5 years.
Slow loading on shared hosting? Read: How to Optimise WordPress Performance on Shared Hosting
SSD drives
SSDs operate completely differently from HDDs. Instead of using a spinning disk, data is stored on interconnected flash memory chips that have no moving parts. Without mechanical limitations, SSDs can read and write data significantly faster, with read/write speeds of up to 600MB/s. HDDs, by comparison, work at around 160MB/s to 200MB/s. In terms of helping your WordPress website perform well, SSDs are by far the better option.
SSDs are also better when it comes to reliability. As there are no moving parts, there is no physical wear of the components and the potential for mechanical breakdown is eradicated. They do, however, have one limitation, and that is the number of times that individual storage cells can be written to, though this can be as many as 100,000. However, because of this limitation, they have a feature called wear levelling which spreads write operations across the drive’s cells to reduce cell death. At the same time, they have built-in redundancy with spare cells that take over from dead ones. Overall, in comparison to an HDD’s 3 to 5-year lifespan, the average SSD can last between five and 10 years.
NVMe SSDs
The newest form of SSD is the NVMe SSD, these are SSD drives that use the NVMe data transfer protocol rather than the traditional SATA method. The key difference is that NVMe SSDs connect to the server’s CPU using PCIe, while SATA SSDs use the Serial ATA Express bus interface which was originally developed for HDDs. While the technology might sound baffling, for WordPress users, the most important thing about NVMe is its blistering speed. An NVMe SSD can offer read/write speeds up to 3,500 MB/s, nearly six times as fast as SATA SSDs and over 17 times faster than an HDD.
Sustainability
The large amounts of data that WordPress websites send and receive means they are not naturally the greenest of options. The more data transmitted, the more CO2 the website generates. While deleting unnecessary plugins can help reduce the impact, the choice of drive can make an even bigger difference. With mechanical parts that need to constantly spin, the HDD drive is the least sustainable option as it needs more energy to operate and as the movement generates heat, it requires more cooling. SSDs by comparison, consume much less power both when idle and active and don’t get as hot.
NVMe SSDs, meanwhile, provide even greater environmental benefits. In terms of power consumption, they use an average of 0.08 watts compared to a SATA SSD’s 0.28 watts and as they use less power, they require even less cooling.
Want an eco-friendly website? Read: Going Green: Why Your Choice of Web Host Matters
Which option to choose?
While this article has made it clear that in terms of performance, reliability and sustainability, the best storage option is NVMe, followed by SATA SSD and then HDDs, the choice isn’t always so simple. Sometimes, HDDs can be a more cost-effective option, especially in situations where performance is not the key priority, such as in data storage and backup solutions. In terms of cost per gigabyte of storage, HDDs can be considerably cheaper and with them not being in constant use, mechanical reliability will be less of an issue.
Conclusion
While WordPress is an exceptional tool for building websites, its reliance on multiple pieces of software, especially lots of plugins, can impact its loading times. The latest WordPress hosting solutions have now been developed to help overcome this problem and boost website speed. Key features of these hosting plans are technologies like SSD and NVMe, that supercharge performance, improve reliability and make websites more sustainable.
For more information about our SSD and NVMe-powered WordPress Hosting plans that come with tools like WP Accelerate and WP Toolkit, visit our WordPress Hosting page.
