SSD or HDD for web server

General Web Dev
#1

I have a plan about buying/building a new computer.
I will install Apache, PHP, and MySQl which are newest versions on the new computer.

I am a little confusing which drive I should choose between SSD or HDD.

It needs speed. I think SSD is faster than HDD.
It needs stable I think HDD is more stable than SSD. But I don’t know exactly.
It needs large storage because It will has many images and movies in the web server. I think HDD is more cheaper per storage.

I am not good at hardware. but I will learn about it this time.
Do you have any idea about it?
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#2

I think your description is correct. But SSD is much safer today. And way faster than HDD.

#3

SSD is a lot faster and just as stable, but more expensive.

Maybe you could go for a hybrid, get a 128GB SSD for your OS and web server needs and then also get a 1TB HDD for all your images and movies etc. For media files HDD are more than fast enough.

1 Like
#4

I like the word “hybrid”.
I can afford the hybrid.

Do you mean installing OS in SSD, and Aphache, PHP, and mySQL in HDD?.
OR
Do you mean installing OS and Apache, PHP, mySQL in SSD, and store images and movies in HDD?.
(in this case, I mean if an image is not inside htdocs of apache, I don’t know how I give image url to an image in HDD like the below)

<img src="image url">
#5

Yes, that is what I mean.

There are ways around that. For example you could instruct Apache to serve images from a different directory, even on another disk.

How much images do you have though, that it wouldn’t fit on 256GB?

#6

This is very interesting.
Since I am not ready to test it, I think, it’s better to ask about it through Server Config forum of sitepoint when I am ready…
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Not many images at the moment.
I bought my current computer many years ago.
The current computer is for current and past.
I will buy or build a new computer for current and future…

If I buy or build a new computer, I should expect or be ready for many images and movies which will happen in the future…

But at the moment and for the time being, I think, 256GB is enough.

#7

It’s funny, nowadays so many things are in the cloud I really don’t see the point of having much disk space locally. Right now I’m only using 106GB and most of that is Windows and a few games.
I don’t have movies locally, I use Netflix and Amazon Prime for that. Don’t have music locally, I have Spotify for that. Don’t have many documents locally, most are in the cloud somewhere.

I actually quite like that, it makes the laptop itself quite disposable. If I ever lost it that would be a shame, but I can rest easy that I won’t have lost many files, if any.

1 Like
#8

[off-topic]
I am also surprised with the internet transfer speed. A cronjob which calls a script to download three XLS spread sheets and convert to MySqli tables takes over a minute locally and about fifteen seconds online.
[/off-topic]

#9

A couple of years ago a 1 TB SSD (such as a Samsung SSD 860 EVO 1TB 2.5 Inch) cost over a thousand dollars. They are very affordable now.

Since you will get a new system, consider a M.2 SATA drive. They are small and are mounted directly on the system board (motherboard). Something such as the following.

As for reliability, plan to do backups. Include in your design backup hardware and software. I cannot suggest anything; I am not good at it. SSD drives are reliable but you should do backups even if they are. Be sure to have a backup of your website.

#10

If I put the code below into a web page, a user can see “img1.jpeg” by opening the page

<img src="http://myDomian/img1.jpeg">

Do you mean the code below does work?

<img src="http://cloud.com/myID/img1.jpeg">

Thank you for your recommendation.

#11

Sure, why not? As long is the URL is publicly accessible (i.e. no username/password required) you can host images from anywhere you like, the browser doesn’t care.

Make sure to read the EULA of the service you want to use for this though, some might not be too happy with it (as they would have to pay for the bandwidth).