A hard disk drive (HDD), commonly referred to as a hard drive (HD), is the central storage mechanism in the computer. It is non-volatile and holds digitally encoded data on rapidly rotating platters with magnetic surfaces. It is usually the home to the operating systems, the software and most files. To break it down, “drive” refers to a device distinct from its medium, like a tape drive and its tape. Early hard drives had removable media; however, a hard drive today is often a sealed unit (except for a filtered vent hole to equalize air pressure) with fixed media. You can learn more about hard drives by reading Wikipedia’s article on hard drives.

We offer three different hard drive options:

  • SATA (Serial ATA): This comes standard in all of our servers. Generally good read/write speed and highest capacity.
  • SAS (Seriel Attached SCSI): Moderate capacity and higher read/write speeds (recommended for databases)
  • SSD (Solid State Drive): Best speed yet does not have the capacity of the above drives. These are excellent for databases, but may wear out sooner than SAS with constant write operations.
  • PCI-E SSD (Solid State Drive via PCI port): Able to achieve higher levels of speed than a traditional SSD by utilizing a port that allows for faster data transfer. 

Prices are available in your MyCP and in the server configuration sections during your check out.