A solid-state drive (SSD) enhances the performance of any application running on it in comparison to an ordinary hard-disk drive (HDD). The reason is that a solid-state drive works by using a number of interconnected flash memory units, so there are no physical parts to move. In comparison, a hard-disk drive employs spinning disks and each reading or writing process causes the disks to rotate, meaning the speed of an HDD is fixed. As the prices of the two kinds of drives are different as well, a lot of desktops and web servers are provided with an SSD for the operating system and various applications, and an HDD for data storage, this way balancing cost and performance. A hosting provider could also use an SSD for caching purposes, thus files that are accessed repeatedly will be kept on such a drive for achieving improved loading speeds and for minimizing the reading/writing processes on the hard-disk drives.
