Question
Do I have an SSD or Spinning Disk Drive?
- Posted on August 13, 2019
- DigitalOceanLAMP StackStorageUbuntu 18.04
Asked by George Chanturidze
How can I check whether my droplet is using an SSD or regular spinning disk drive?
I had set up a swap space on the disk. I recently read that setting up swap space on SSD is bad because it degrades performance, so I want to check what kind of a drive I’m using.
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Hi geochanto,
I think you are getting SSD and what a spinning disk drive is mixed up.
A spinning disk drive
A spinning disk is the mechanism within a hard disk drive to which memory is written. With rotating plates attached to an arm that writes the data, the spinning disk mechanism physically resembles a record player (although it is sealed within an enclosure). It’s the technology used behind writing data on your hard drive(SSD or HDD).
What I believe you are wondering is if you are using SSD or HDD.
These days, SCSI HDDs (Small Computer System Interface hard disk drives) are quickly being replaced by SDDs (solid state drives). Unlike the spinning disk of an HDD, a solid state drive involves no moving parts. Instead, data is stored on a series of connected flash memory chips
Your droplet is using SSD. Having said that, you’ve mentioned swap and how it’s slower on SSD. Yes, compared to RAM, swap no matter using SSD or HDD is slower. Despite this, compared to HDD, SSD is much better.
Kind regards, Kalin D.
@Kdimitrov thank you. You are right, I just meant HDD vs SSD, and thanks for pointing out the droplets use SSD.
I was referring to this article: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-add-swap-space-on-ubuntu-16-04, specifically this line: “using swap with SSDs can cause issues with hardware degradation over time. Due to this consideration, we do not recommend enabling swap on DigitalOcean or any other provider that utilizes SSD storage.”
So with that in mind, is it better to just bite the bullet and increase RAM to deal with peak RAM usage, instead of having the swap space? Because of course I don’t want swap space to cause hardware failures down the road.