CPU and memory are easy to compare by the numbers. Disks are trickier: 100 GB on HDD and 100 GB on NVMe differ in speed by 50x — and it’s the disk that most often slows down 1C, databases and websites.
Three types by the numbers
| HDD | SSD (SATA) | NVMe | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Operations per second (IOPS) | 100–200 | 50 000–90 000 | 300 000–1 000 000 |
| Sequential read | 150–200 MB/s | 500–550 MB/s | 3 000–7 000 MB/s |
| Latency | 5–10 ms | 0.1 ms | 0.02 ms |
| Price per GB | 1× | 3–4× | 5–6× |
| Use for | archives, backups, video | websites, files, small databases | 1C, DBMS, heavy-load applications |
Why databases depend on the disk
1C, PostgreSQL and MS SQL perform thousands of small random read/write operations: posting a single document means dozens of writes to different tables and the transaction log. What matters here isn’t megabytes per second but IOPS and latency. An HDD with its 150 IOPS chokes with just 3–5 active 1C users; NVMe handles hundreds.
What to choose for the job
- Business card site, blog — SSD is enough; the difference with NVMe is unnoticeable.
- Online store, CRM, 1C with up to 20 users — NVMe: document posting and reports run 3–5x faster than on SATA SSD.
- 1C with 20+ users, analytics, MS SQL — NVMe only, ideally on a dedicated server.
- Video archive, backups, file archive — HDD: data is written sequentially and rarely read, so there’s no reason to pay for NVMe.
- Company file storage — SSD for “hot” folders, HDD for the archive (MCDrive does this automatically).
How to tell if the disk is the bottleneck
On Linux: iostat -x 1 — if %util stays near 100% and await is above 10 ms, the disk can’t keep up. On Windows: Resource Monitor → Disk → “Queue Length” consistently above 2. If the CPU is only 20–30% loaded at the same time, a CPU upgrade won’t help — you need a faster disk.
At MyCloud
All VPS run on redundant NVMe arrays, with no surcharge for disk type. Archive volumes (video archive, backups, cold S3 storage) sit on HDD at a lower price per gigabyte. In the calculator, you can change disk size at any time, without reinstalling.
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