In the past few years, technology concerning hard drives has grown dramatically. Most notably, “Solid State” drives and “PCIe Flash” drives are becoming the norm. These newer technologies have made their way into segments of a widely untouched computer hardware industry. After several years of testing and perfecting, it’s clear that SSD and Flash drives are the best choice for all database applications. The speed and performance of these drives is undeniable. This article will take a quick look at these new technologies, while explaining why they should be deployed to your server environment.

Let’s Start With Some Terminology:

• HHD – HHD stands for “Hard Disk Drives”. HDD were first introduced by IBM in 1956, yes this is a nearly 60- year old technology. A HDD uses magnetism to store data on a rotating platter. A read/write head floats above the spinning platter while reading and writing data. The faster the platter spins, the faster a HDD can perform. Typical laptop drives today spin at either 5400 RPM (Revolutions per Minute) or 7200 RMP, though some server-based platters spin at up to 15,000 RPM!
• SSD – SSD stands for “Solid State Drives”. A SSD does not have a mechanical arm to read and write data like a typical hard drive, it instead relies on an embedded processor (or “brain”) called a controller to perform many operations related to reading and writing data.
• PCIe Flash – PCIe Flash drives have actually been around for many years. They have recently become a more affordable technology. The price combined with the advancement in technology makes PCIe Flash drives the premier solution. These utilize flash memory to store and access transactions. This is a process similar to the memory that a computer uses to run applications before committing them to a typical HDD disk drive.
• IOPS – IOPS stands for “Internal/Output Per Second”. This is the typical measurement used to compare hard drives. Generally speaking, the greater the IOPS, the faster the speed.

Performance

When measuring database server performance, there are many things to consider. One of the most important being hard drive speed, along with latency, network performance and server performance. When a workstation makes a connection to a database, the server must spend time reading that data, while then returning the results. Depending on the size of the database, the time this takes can vary. The time that the server spends reading the data is measured in IOPS. The chart below illustrates the performance differences between the various hard drives and the average IOPS.

SAS SSD offers a 5401% performance increase and PCIe Flash offers a whopping performance of 144599% over traditional hard drives.

Does this mean that you can pop in a PCIe Flash drive and get a 144599% speed improvement? No, because there are other limiting factors listed above that can also impact speed and performance. This being said, the PCIe Flash Drive on its own will still give a huge increase in speed.

Costs

Many people feel that SSD and Flash drives are too expensive. We try to always bring these points to reality for firms looking to save a few dollars, so take a look at the chart below. Administrators are quick to discount the “labor” portion of the expense when comparing costs of servers. For this comparison, let’s assume these are the costs for a 50 user firm with an average hard drive life span of 3 years.

Now, let’s take a look at your cost of labor for each day. Assume that all 50 users make $30,000 annually. This gives us a price of labor per day of $4,109. Upgrading to a PCIe will only represent approximately %.002 of your daily cost budget. When compared to labor costs, even a slight increase in speed will result in gain for your firm. How much in labor costs do you lose when a user runs a report and it takes 5 minutes to reach  competition instead of 2?

Conclusion

PCIe Flash drives are here to stay. A new technology may be right around the corner but that does not exempt one from improving now. While tests are still ongoing with Orion specific software, the initial reports of huge increases in speed are very promising and enough to provide our seal of recommendation. If you are looking to deploy this type of hard drive at your firm, we invite you to discuss this with us!