Dawn of the Geeks

Solid state drives are finally becoming large enough that computers can be built without a conventional hard drive. Any modern OS can be installed on a solid state drive now. However, they’re very expensive and can’t hold as much as the conventional drives. The basic idea is that you use a solid state drive for your OS to speed up your system but continue using large conventional drives for all your personal data. It’s generally a good idea to keep your personal data on one drive and your OS on another regardless of what type of hard drives you use.

What I’m finding flash drives to be very useful for is running web sites off of them. I’ve been running my own servers for years and end up having to buy new hard drives every year which gets expensive. I realized that the majority of my web-sites are essentially static and they’re small.

So for $5 I can store all my web-sites on a 1-2GB flash drive. If the drive dies I can replace it for $5 instead of $35-100.

The advantage of using a flash drive is that the sites load much faster. The hard drive is no longer a limiting factor for the site itself. Just the database which of course still uses a regular hard drive since flash drives die quickly with heavy writing.

My server used to have a hard drive for the OS and web apps, the database, the logs and the web-sites themselves. I stopped bothering with logging since it’s too much useless information and there are better ways to log errors and visits without being limited to the server app (Apache or IIS). So now my server is down to two conventional drives and as many flash drives as I need.