NVMe, SSD or hard drives: which storage should your server have?

Storage is where server prices split the most. Two machines with the same CPU and RAM can be $40 apart because one has NVMe drives and the other has a pair of hard disks. Which one you need depends almost entirely on how your software reads and writes data.

Hard drives: cheap space, slow seeks

A spinning hard drive is great at one thing: storing a lot of data for very little money. It reads large files from start to finish quickly. What it does badly is jump around. Each random read means moving a physical arm, and a typical drive manages only a couple of hundred of those a second.

Hard drives make sense for backups, media libraries for Plex or Jellyfin, archives, log storage and seedboxes. Anything where files are big and you mostly read them in order.

SATA SSD: the safe default

An SSD has no moving parts, so random reads are tens of thousands a second instead of hundreds. For a website with a database, that difference is huge. Pages that wait on queries come back faster, and the server copes with more visitors before it slows down.

If you are not sure what to buy, buy SSD. It fits WordPress, online stores, mail servers and most web apps.

NVMe: for the heavy hitters

NVMe drives are also solid state, but they connect straight to the CPU over PCIe instead of through the older SATA interface. They are several times faster again, especially under many parallel requests.

You will feel NVMe on large MySQL or PostgreSQL databases, search engines like Elasticsearch, game servers that load chunks of the world constantly and CI servers compiling big projects. For a small site, you probably will not.

Mixed machines

Some servers ship with a small SSD plus large hard drives. That combination is often the best value of all: put the operating system and databases on the SSD and the bulk files on the hard drives.

A quick way to decide

1. Mostly big files, few users at once? Hard drives.
2. A website or app with a database? SSD.
3. A big database or lots of writes? NVMe.

Whatever you pick, ask for RAID 1 if the machine has two matching drives. A mirrored pair means one dead disk is an inconvenience instead of a disaster.