This blog is a short introduction to the two different types of SATA SSD and NVMe SSD drives Leaseweb offers its customers. If you want to optimize your costs by selecting the right type of drive, this article is for you.
For many years, Leaseweb has been offering SSD drives to its customers. Our customers expect these drives to perform without a flaw and continue to do so for many years. To ensure that we meet these demands and to limit the potential for failed drives, Leaseweb offers ‘Write-Intensive’ SSD drives that can handle the (sometimes heavy writing) workload.
But one size doesn’t fit all; every customer has a different workload and doesn’t want to pay for high-end drives if their use case is entirely different.
This is where ‘Mix-Use’ drives come into the picture. Mix-Use drives are for customers who don’t run a heavy daily workload with lots of disk writes and can benefit from the lower device prices and the performance and reliability that these SSDs offer.
Our statistics show that around 80% of Leaseweb’s customers have little benefit in the more expensive Write-Intensive drives. In fact, they save money by optimizing their servers with the Mix-Use drives.
Selecting the right type of disk for your workload
Since you don’t want to end up with failing disk drives that require replacement, it’s essential to choose the right drive type for your server. If you already have an environment that can provide disk statistics, you can use those numbers to check which type is the right fit for you. If no data is available to you, then use these basic rules of thumb to decide which type will be your best fit:
- Write-Intensive – Disks that are meant for applications that require a lot of write cycles. They are used for write-intensive applications, where the read/write workloads are split approximately 50/50. These disks offer the highest endurance and are meant for use cases such as HPC, intensive database logging, high-performing analytics, and caching. Next to endurance, these disks also offer more write performance due to higher random write IOPS.
- Mix-Use – Disks that require a medium to low amount of write cycles. They are used for mixed or read-intensive applications, where the read/write workloads are split approximately 70/30, offering medium endurance. Email/messaging, OLTP, and E-commerce are some of the example workloads. These disks provide high read and write performance suitable for most workloads.
Endurance Definitions
Disk endurance is defined by the number of Drive Writes per Day (DWPD) or the number of Terabytes Written (TBW).
- DWPD (Device Writes per Day) defines how many times the daily capacity of a SATA SSD or NVMe SSD can be overwritten during the warranty period, as defined by the drive manufacturer.
- TBW (Terabytes Written) is the total amount of data that can be written into a SATA SSD or NVMe SSD within the warranty, as defined by the drive manufacturer.
On our Knowledge Base, you can find the disk performance parameters of the disks we offer.
Once you know the capacity of a disk and the warranty period, these values can be used to provide an appropriate calculation for your case. For example, our Write-Intensive disks have a higher DWPD value than the Mix-Use disks. Our Mix-Use devices come in the same capacity sizes as the Write-Intensive ones. This means one thing less to worry about when choosing the right type of drive.
I hope this article makes choosing the right drive for your workload and budget a bit easier. Should you have any questions on whether the choice you made is the right one, feel free to contact us via sales@leaseweb.com. We are more than happy to go through your platform with you and help you make the right choice.