30 GB NVMe storage

We understand it can be challenging to determine how much storage capacity is enough. To get a better feel for what you get with 30 gigabytes of storage, consider the following figures:

30 GB is enough for...

  • 20,480 4K screenshots*.
  • 1,536 HDR photos**.
  • 69 fresh installations of WordPress***.

It's worth nothing that a fresh WordPress installation consumes only about 1% of the available storage capacity.

Storage device types

The two most commonly-used types of storage devices are hard disk drives (HDD) and solid-state drives (SSD).

Hard disk drive

Hard disk drives are the old-school mechanical storage devices which use magnetic platters as the storage medium and heads to read/write the data to the medium. You can think of a hard disk drive like a record player; To read from a file, the head must first move to a precise location over the platter, just like the needle on a record player must be moved to play a specific song. This required movement is the main contributor to the unimpressive throughput of hard disk drives. They are still in use today due to their large storage capacities, but the speed at which they can read and write data pales in comparison to that of a solid-state drive.

Solid-state drive

Unlike a hard disk drive, a solid-state drive does not have any moving parts. Instead, computer chips are used to store the data, making access to the data significantly faster. To put it into perspective, conservative estimates suggest that a solid-state drive can read/write data about 3-6 times faster than a hard disk drive****. And the performance difference only increases from there when using an NVMe solid-state drive.

Storage device interfaces

In the prior section we compared the performance of hard disk drives and solid-state drives, but there's one more consideration which greatly impacts the performance of a storage device: The interface used to connect the storage device to the computer. Let's summarize the two most common interfaces: SATA and NVMe.

SATA

Similar to hard disk drives, the SATA interface is the old-school way to connect a storage device to a computer. Typically there's a ribbon cable with one end plugged into the computer's motherboard and the other end plugged into the hard disk drive. The best-performing SATA interfaces, known as SATA III has a transfer speed limit of 6 Gb/s (gigabits per second). Not only do hard disk drives use SATA, some solid-state drives use this aging interface too.

NVMe

NVMe is a newer interface which features a connector which is affixed directly to the computer's motherboard. Contrary to SATA, with NVMe no cable is used. Instead, the NVMe storage device is connected directly to the motherboard, via the interface's connector. But the connection method is not what makes NVMe unique. NVMe was designed specifically for solid-state drives (and flash-based storage devices). Thus, there are no hard disk drives which can connect to the NVMe interface. This clear cut from the past allowed the NVMe interface to be optimized, which explains why NVMe storage devices can reach transfer rates of up to 32 Gb/s. That's five times faster than the fastest SATA interface.

We only offer the best storage solution

Our commitment to providing only the best, deluxe WordPress hosting solution is the reason why our hosting plan offers 30 GB of NVMe storage. We want your WordPress site to operate at peak optimum performance. Thus, we simply don't bother with other less-than-stellar solutions. To learn more about our premium WordPress hosting plan, visit our home page here.

Footnotes

  • * Assuming an average file size of 1.5 MB.
  • ** Assuming an average file size of 20 MB.
  • *** Each WordPress installation consumes about 40 MB and an entire MariaDB installation consumes about 400 MB. Note, our WordPress hosting plan can only host a single site per plan. This metric is only used for demonstration purposes, and does not imply you can install multiple WordPress instances per hosting plan.
  • **** The estimate is for sequential reads/writes. The performance increases to 50-100 times faster for random reads/writes.