A solid-state drive is incredibly faster than any conventional hard disk. This is because a hard-disk drive uses spinning disks, that can rotate only so fast and the more data is read and written, the slower and hotter they become, whereas an SDD takes advantage of modules of flash memory, hence there are no actually moving components. The access speeds for an SSD are significantly higher, which makes this kind of drives the best solution when speed is needed. This is the reason why SSDs are frequently employed for the Operating System on a personal computer and for saving data that's used regularly on servers. Many providers also use a combination of the two drives, so they save the data on HDDs, but they use several SSDs to cache the more frequently used data and as a consequence, the data loads quicker while the load on the HDDs is decreased since their disks need to spin less frequently in order to read and write.
SSD with Data Caching in Web Hosting
The cloud platform where we create web hosting accounts uses solely SSD drives, so your web applications and static sites will load very fast. The SSDs are used for files, e-mails and databases, so regardless of whether you load a page or check for new emails using webmail, the content will load without delay. In order to ensure even higher speeds, we also use a group of dedicated SSDs that function only as cache. All the content which 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 better performance. What we achieve this way in addition to the better speed is reduced overall load, thus lower probability of hardware failures, and longer lifespan of the main drives, that is one more level of security for any data that you upload to your account.
SSD with Data Caching in Semi-dedicated Hosting
All semi-dedicated hosting accounts that we provide are generated on a cloud platform that uses exclusively SSD drives. We don't use HDDs any longer, so your websites will load extremely fast as we employ SSDs for each aspect of the service - files, databases and e-mails. As some users may host Internet sites that can be more popular than others, we also use a number of drives for caching. Our system discovers any content that is loaded more regularly and clones it on these drives in order to load it from them. This setup is used for load-balancing purposes as we make sure that several reading/writing intensive websites will not affect the performance of the other websites which are stored on the very same main drive. Using caching drives also increases the lifespan of the main storage SSDs and decreases the probability of disk failures.