New Drives Offerings: 2TB Drives and More SSD Options

We've decided it was about time to revamp our drive offerings as our solid state drives have proven to be extremely popular, while others have fallen out of favor. I'll start with the bad news, we're no longer offering 150GB or 300GB 10k RPM SATA drives (Raptors) due to low demand and poor reliability. We are still offering the 74GB drives, but only for as long as we have them in stock. If you're currently using these drives, don't worry, we still have spares around in case of a drive failure. Then, on the plus side, we are now offering larger 600GB 15k RPM SAS (SA-SCSI) drives and 2TB SATA drives to keep up with the changes there, but the main additions are the new lines of solid state drives (SSD), focusing on having some more affordable options. We're still sticking solely with Intel drives, as we've been extremely happy with their performance and reliability. We've tested various other brands, and none of the others we've tested seem to be ready for a server environment like the Intel drives are. The new Intel SSD offerings are from the Intel X25-M and X25-V series, which are basically the same, an Intel X25-V 40GB drive for only $15 a month (making it a free upgrade option as a primary drive on most of our servers) and the Intel X25-M 160GB drive at $50 per month, allowing you to have more SSD capacity at a reasonable price point. These MLC based drives still perform very well, but not quite to the extent of the SLC Intel X25-E drives we've been offering. On reads you should see similar performance, but the X25-E will have over twice the write performance, which is critical in heavy write environments, which can be the case with many databases. In addition, the lifespan of the X25-E is significantly longer (~70 years with 100GB in writes per day) due to the SLC technology and enterprise nature of the drive, while the X25-M and X25-V (5+ years in same scenario) should still have ample lifespans in most environments, it can still be an additional concern. If you're interested in more data on these SSD drives and how they compare in head-to-head performance we recommend the following articles http://techreport.com/articles.x/15931/1 & http://techreport.com/articles.x/17269 These drives can be purchased immediately with any of our dedicated server offerings, Dedicated Servers with Basic Management, Fully Managed Dedicated Servers, and Discount Dedicated Servers