Solid State Drives or SSD for short, outperform traditional spinning hard drives by a wide margin. Certain websites or web applications can make it difficult to tell what type of hard drive is in use but because Magento is very resource intensive and requires a lot of file reads, it is quite clear when a Magento store is hosted on a SSD hard drive. We recently did a comparison for a client to show them the difference a solid state disk makes when running a Magento store, below are the results of the test:
Magento Store Load Time Comparison
| Traditional Hard Drive | Solid State Drive | |
| Mean Servers | 6.27 seconds | 0.89 seconds |
| Media Temple | 12.20 seconds | 2.45 seconds |
The difference is clear, a solid state drive outperforms a traditional hard drive by a wide margin, even on a competitors plan.
Mean Servers always recommends hosting Magento stores on their own dedicated VPS plan that utilizes a SSD. The performance increase for a Magento store is immediately apparent and stores will load instantaneously, even on the first load. Faster loading websites results in lower visitor turnover, higher visitor satisfaction and increased sales. If you are interested in speeding up your website, whether powered by Magento or not, check out our Solid State Drive VPS plans today!