There was a time when solid state drives (SSD) were not a technology within reach for small and medium-sized businesses. But SSD performance has dramatically improved in recent years thanks to flash technology. As the performance improves and the price drops, increasingly, companies now wonder whether they should move away from hard disk drives (HDD) toward SSD.

HDD still has some advantages, depending on the application. At the most basic level, deciding between the two usually comes down to figuring out the value of performance versus storage capacity as they relate to your budget. For many businesses, it may make sense to combine both in your network infrastructure. Read on for some questions to ask yourself as you decide whether and where to deploy each.

Performance vs. Capacity – For the Price

SSD is fast, but HDD will offer you more capacity for less money up front. So as you decide when and where to deploy SSD or HDD, ask yourself these questions:

How important is speed? There are cases when a small difference in speed can translate to a big difference in the performance of your business. For instance, if your company relies heavily on desktop virtualization, small I/O delays could mean a lot of frustration and reduced productivity for employees. Or perhaps your revenues come primarily from e-commerce. Delays in payment processing could lead to costly high shopping cart abandonment rates. It’s not hard to see how trade-offs like these would justify the additional investment for faster performance.

Make a list of the applications that are mission-critical and for which latency could have major negative consequences. For applications that require speed, especially if they’re centrally important to your business, it may be better to go with SSD.

Does the application require especially high capacity? If capacity is the priority rather than speed, HDD might be a better bet. SSD has yet to catch up to HDD when it comes to per-GB up-front investment. So for things that require high capacity – like data backup, archiving, and disaster recovery – choose HDD. The extra speed you would get from SSD is often not necessary or worth the additional cost for these applications.

How will this affect our longer-term finances? As the examples of payment processing and desktop virtualization show, the financial benefits and drawbacks of SSD or HDD aren’t just about the up-front costs. Your choice could have a measurable impact on productivity, revenues, and costs over time. SSDs usually use less power, another thing to factor in over the long haul. Only you know if your near-term budget and cash flow can justify the extra initial investment for SSD, but the long-term financial benefits are worth looking at, too.

Why Choose Just One?

If you’re running multiple applications in your business, chances are good that some will perform better using SSD, and some are better suited for HDD. By utilizing a flexible storage solution that supports building RAID sets in both SSD and HDD, you can realize the benefits of both. The first step is to conduct some analysis on your applications and budget to get an understanding of whether speed or capacity should be the primary driver in your selection. As you then look at your budget for adding new storage devices, make sure to calculate both the up-front investment and the potential longer-term revenue, productivity, and cost implications.

As you analyze your storage needs and budget, these recent blog posts might also be helpful:

You can also contact an experienced representative who will get to know your business and help you evaluate your storage options.