First Solid State Drive (SSD) Dedicated Servers Become Available

1 08 2008
651.gif It’s no secret that I’ve been a big fan of LiquidWeb’s dedicated servers since I started using them last year. I got my invoice this month, and read a little further down the email where I was surprised to learn that they now have Zero Latency, Solid State Drives available for their dedicated servers! “What is that?” I first though. I put 2 and 2 together, because I know what latency is (and “0″ is a good number when you’re talking about it), and I know what “solid state” means (usually refers to circuitry as opposed to moving parts), so it became clear that they’re offering these brand new solid state drives (SSD) on their servers. Wow!

What’s the Big Deal?
One of the biggest bottlenecks on a computer is the hard drive. If the PC needs to access your hard drive, it slows things down considerably. This is why having enough RAM can speed things up significantly - with RAM, you eliminate the bottleneck of having to search and rescue data from a spinning hard drive. Well, Solid State Drives work like RAM. It’s like replacing your hard drive with a giant RAM chip :) the data becomes instantly accessible to the processor.

Can you imagine how great this will be for websites? Especially forums like mine. It should make them blazingly fast.

I had to call LiquidWeb to find out more. I talked to one of the sales guys, and he confirmed that “yes, the solid state drives are available for the dedicated servers, and LiquidWeb is currently one of only a few dedicated server providers in the world that have them available.”

So the almighty “RackSpace” doesn’t even have these things yet, and when they do get them, RS customers should be prepared to whip out their pocketbook. LiquidWeb will do the upgrade for $150 / mo. right now, with discounts for volume. Not cheap by any means, but I would imagine that it’s a nice performance boost for database driven sites. While it’s not in my budget right now, I can’t wait to try them out. Hopefully anyone with experience with them will post a review.

For more info on LiquidWeb, click here.


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