northamber

Total Distribution™

SSD or HDD?
Which has better TCO?
Prepare to be surprised! by the Northamber
Storage Specialist

The cost of SSD vs traditional HDD has been a moving target for some
time. Whilst the individual SSD cost might still be higher than an
individual HDD we think the total picture is a different one.
Let’s take a closer look.
The capacity of flash drives has been increasing at an explosive rate over the last few years.
The multiple stacking methodologies of flash cells has grown capacity by around 256
times, the same growth that took several decades for HDD to achieve.

If you look at Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) you’ll find SSD beats HDD in almost all cases.
Just the power savings can be in the range of £8-10 per year and if you consider the speed
of SSD you can even reduce the number of servers needed, further improving the cost
savings. Of course, calculating TCO is complicated and will vary case by case.

And there are IT trends that impact the cost of storage. First, we are rapidly migrating away
from the traditional RAID arrays, to more compact storage appliances that deliver more
data, with fewer SSDs and clever software that controls it all. Second, the new storage
appliances are able to compress data in the background thanks to the high bandwidth of
the SSDs within. HDDs can’t do this as they are too slow and therefore SSD delivers more
usable storage without costing more!

MARKET-LEADING FULL PRODUCT LOGISTICS & CONFIGURATION

COMMERCIAL TERMS PORTFOLIO WAREHOUSING CENTRE

t: 020 8296 7066 | w: northamber.com

 northamber
Total Distribution™

SSD or HDD?
Which has better TCO?
...cont
The need for speed
SSDs are around 1000X faster than HDDs on random I/O. Throughput can be anywhere
from 5X to 100X better when compared to the fastest HDDs. So whilst HDD was holding
back overall server performance, SSD along with improvements in processor speeds is
unleashing new levels of performance.

So the key metric is not so much the cost per TB, the real cost saving is in the need for
fewer servers, when applications can run at double the speed! This saving can more
than offset the SSD costs and now the idea of upgrading servers from HDD to SSD is a
viable one and can even extend the life of hardware by several years. These performance
improvements are even more noticeable in a virtualised server environment.

Stack them high!

Manufacturers are finding new and cleverer ways to improve density. This gives us the
amazing improvements in space saving and power reduction. The bottom line is that in
the same physical space, SSD now provides more storage than HDD. Further, the price of a
1 TB SSD (in a tiny M2.0 footprint) is the same as a 2.5 inch SATA SSD drive. This means we
can now squeeze 1TB data into the space taken up by two sticks of chewing gum!

Compress your data (and your costs)

Data compression has become a standard software feature of flash arrays and server
operating systems. This is because the speed of SDD enables compression to happen in
real time or in background without degrading overall performance. It can deliver between
5x and 100x compression in many cases. HDD is simply not fast enough to enable this
– giving SSD a huge advantage. Compression delivers huge cost savings and is a major
consideration when choosing storage technologies. All things considered the TCO case for
SSD over HDD is compelling.

Talk to the storage experts at Northamber to discuss your requirements.

MARKET-LEADING FULL PRODUCT LOGISTICS & CONFIGURATION

COMMERCIAL TERMS PORTFOLIO WAREHOUSING CENTRE

t: 020 8296 7066 | w: northamber.com