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I have recently been thinking of requesting SSD Drives from my hosting provider however its a $300 per month upgrade for 4 x 300GB Intel S3500 SSD's

My hosting company told me they do not use SSD because they did not see a significant change in performance over their 15k SAS HDD drives.

I am hosting a magento website with around 100k products. The dedicated server I am on has Dual Hex Core Processors, 24 GB of DDR3-RDIMM 1333MHz Ram, 15K SAS HHD's in RAID 10, and a CDN network. Paying about 479 per month.

I would like to know your opinions if the SSD drives would show noticeable performance gains and if it warrants 300 per month?

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    Go shopping for another provider. I pay less than a third of that for machines with better specs. May 23, 2015 at 0:03
  • May I ask who your with? I'd appreciate it.
    – Daniel
    May 23, 2015 at 0:35
  • Also the dedicated server I'm on is "Managed" Not sure that makes much a difference. Is it possible you can tell me who your width? I'd really like to check them out.
    – Daniel
    May 23, 2015 at 2:13
  • your hosting provider is FREAKING EXPENSIVE! no matter what management package they have, im sure they do nothing for magento, in fact why do you think you need an SSD?? is there any performance problems???
    – ADM
    May 23, 2015 at 10:23
  • Yea i also thought it was too expensive. I did some shopping around like Michael Hampton suggested (even though he did not comment back which I was hopping he would.) I found a hosting provider that charged 399 for the below specs, but its raid 1. Do you think it will be faster than my current setup? Specs are here screencast.com/t/XTgE9lZx8cYz (I would have typed it but the character limit does not allow)
    – Daniel
    May 23, 2015 at 17:05

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My hosting company told me they do not use SSD because they did not see a significant change in performance over their 15k SAS HDD drives.

They are drunk, idiots, on drugs or simply used a benchmark making little sense or being too specific (like a web server that will not see a large difference - compared to a databsae server for example). A lot depends on the usage scenario - but it makes a generic answer like the one given to you meaningless.

I would like to know your opinions if the SSD drives would show noticeable performance gains and if it warrants 300 per month?

You tell us. Basically - are you IO limited or not? Any OS worth a cent or nothing (i.e. open source) can measure IO load. If you are IO limited then yes ,the gain will be brutal - we talk of a factor of 100 times more IO as a guideline for a decent SSD (and that is a low number) a 15k SAS disc is measured at IIRC 450 IOPS... 45K IOPS are not exactly stellar for a SSD, and you can go up beyond 200k.

Virtualization - yes. Databases - possibly. But not sure your tiny setup (100k products are not exactly a large database) hits here. Can be you serve it all out of memory anyway.

Basically a semi competent admin has to make an evaluation - it is possibly the benefit will be extremely, it is possible the benefit will be hardly something to measure. Totally depends where your bottleneck is now.

I replaced a RAID of 10k SAS HDD in a Raid 10 (8 of them) with a Raid 50 of 6 SSD and the throughput jumped. But then this is a 3tb database that at times does heavy analysis - with just 48gb memory as a buffer. Use cases matter extremely here.

OTOH I also use SSD generally as boot discs on workstations on computers - it does make a difference during patch days and a small SSD is not exactly that expensive (and yes, you likely do get ripped off).

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  • I did some shopping around like Michael Hampton suggested (even though he did not comment back which I was hopping he would.) I found a hosting provider that charged 399 for the below specs, but its raid 1. Do you think it will be faster than my current setup? Specs are here screencast.com/t/XTgE9lZx8cYz (I would have typed it but the character limit does not allow)
    – Daniel
    May 23, 2015 at 13:56
  • That depends whether IO Will be your problem. The IO side will be a lot faster - but whether the machine will be depends on the measurements you should have been taking before posting here.
    – TomTom
    May 23, 2015 at 18:58
  • Sorry about that. What stats should I ask my host for?
    – Daniel
    May 23, 2015 at 20:23
  • An admin? We do not deal with end users here - as per site FAQ. If you do not know how to administrate your server, your admin should be here asking the question.
    – TomTom
    May 23, 2015 at 20:31
  • Magento is a hog, and demands resources far out of line from what you would expect from, say, the size of the database, the traffic level, etc. Which is why I don't recommend anyone use it if they can avoid it. May 24, 2015 at 4:44
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Your IT provider is charging way too much for 4x 300GB S3500. Heck, you can buy one of them for about 250$

That said, it is only you that can determine if the SSD upgrade is worth or not. Is you application I/O bound? If so, SSD are way faster than 15k drivers (somewhat between 5-20X, depending on I/O pattern and mean size).

If not (eg: your application and data are all cached in RAM), then no SSD will give you tangible benefits.

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