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As more and more of our businesses go online and stay there, storage has evolved rapidly; not just in terms of speed, but also in storage size. Where once a terabyte of storage was unthinkably large in scale (and prohibitively expensive for all but the most practical business cases), now it’s a small footnote in what is now a data-filled world. Along with file storage sizes, speeds and form factors have also evolved; gone is the golden era of mechanical hard-drives, humming reliably in our systems. Memory prices have fallen in recent years, making SSDs of all form factors and storage sizes a realistic option for a variety of business use-cases. But what should your business be using? Is it time to move on from mechanical drives? Or should you stick with what you know? What’re the benefits to modern solid-state storage?

Mechanical Drives: Low-Price, High Volume

As SSDs begin to gain a real foothold in the market, mechanical drives have had to compete; unable to compete in speed, longevity, or physical dimensions, they’ve instead had to fall back on the common denominator; price. You can commonly find consumer-grade multi-terabyte storage solutions up to 10+ TB for around £100 or less. Enterprise hard-drives are more expensive, though they offer more reliable performance and more consistent read/write longevity. The benefits of hard-drives (HDDs) for businesses:

• They’re cheap, and businesses are able to purchase huge quantities of storage space at a low cost.
• Ideal for long-term storage, redundancy (RAID) backups, and cold storage of important data.
• A larger market means a variety of options, from consumer-grade hardware to enterprise-class NAS solutions.

The drawbacks of hard-drives (HDDs) for businesses:

• Hard-drives have a shorter performance lifetime compared to SSDs; the average hard-drive is expected to last around three to five years before being at risk of crashes, sector errors, and so on.
• The technology is more fragile than SSD hardware; with a spinning platter and other moving parts, any knocks or drops can ruin the drive completely, as opposed to SSDs, with no moving parts at all.
• They’re much slower than modern solid-state storage.
• Hard-drives use more electricity and require more cooling.

Solid-State Storage: Higher Price, Peak Performance

SSD technology has been around for some time already, and with memory prices having fallen recently, now offer businesses a financially viable alternative to the traditional hard-drive storage option. A terabyte of solid-state storage can be easily found for £100 or less in the consumer space, while enterprise-grade products can still range higher. While more expensive, SSDs offer businesses a range of benefits. The benefits of solid-state drives (SSDs) for businesses:

• Storage speed is considerably faster than hard-drive solutions; SSDs offer speeds up to and above 500MB/s reads and writes.
• There are no moving parts, making SSD hardware more reliable and less prone to data-ruining damage.
• Use less electricity and run cooler than hard-drives.
• Are typically smaller, making them viable for a variety of use-cases in laptops, small systems, and other size-conscious applications.

The drawbacks of solid-state drives (SSDs) for businesses:

• They’re more expensive. While prices have come down considerably, SSD technology remains a more expensive option, particularly for businesses looking for a considerable amount of storage space. Per GB of storage, SSDs remain considerably higher in price.
• Currently, SSD technology is limited in size; while you can find hard-drive disks offering up to 16 terabytes of storage, SSD storage has only recently reached 8 terabytes, which is still in a prototype stage (as of January 2020).
• The flash cells in SSD technology can often fail sooner than HDDs in intensive environments where lots of data is being written and read, compared to hard-drives which can be rated for much longer periods of time, though their moving parts can be the point of failure long before such data failure beings to occur.

NVMe Drives: The New SSD

PCIe-based NVMe drives are the latest technology, typically taking a similar form to that of a stick of RAM. Installed directly onto the motherboard in an M.2 slot, NVMe SSDs offer thousands of GB/s speeds, ideal for businesses needing rapid access and transfer speeds for their data; one such example would be video editing departments accessing high-resolution assets. It’s not uncommon to find consumer-grade 1 terabyte NVMe drives offering up to 3,500 GB/s speeds for less than £150. As you can imagine, enterprise-grade products are considerably higher. As the technology evolves, businesses can expect this technology to become the norm in data-intensive environments. Companies such as AMD are already focusing on this technology, now offering PCIe 4.0 support with their latest platform, doubling the bandwidth speeds to PCIe lanes on the motherboard, and removing possible bottlenecks for PCIe products such as NVMe drives and graphics cards.

A Third Option? Optical Media

Cloud storage and onsite networking both rely on your business choosing between an SSD or HDD configuration, but when it comes to key functions, long-term ‘cold’ storage, staying compliant, and so on, optical media is still a viable option, particularly when you consider the low cost and space requirements for such media. If it makes sense for your business, consider offloading a lot of the data transfer and lightening your business bandwidth with physical storage in this way.  

So Which Storage Technology Should Your Business Use, and How?

When it comes to storage, the best solution is a bit of both. SSDs are the ideal solution for rapid-access storage in systems and workstations that need to be responsive and access data and applications quickly. While more expensive, the performance improvements offer unparalleled productivity benefits over hard-drive options. In addition, laptops and other systems at risk of being dropped, damaged or otherwise impacted by users benefit from the reduced risk of data-loss SSDs offer. Hard-drives, due to their comparatively low price, serve as the ideal solution for large quantities of storage; if you’re storing company data, configuring an onsite data server, or storing terabytes of media assets as a media agency, hard-drives continue to be the most cost-effective solution.