IWEB .0001 Solid State Drive I/O Performance Solid State Drives (SSDs) utilize flash memory instead of spinning disks to store data. Since there are no moving parts, you eliminate much of the latency compared to a normal hard disk drive (HDD), thus allowing faster reads and writes of data. In particular, an SSD is very effective for small block random I/Os; about 30 times as fast for writes, and an astounding 100 times as fast for reads (as shown in Figure 1 below). One SSD is as fast as 50 or so HDDs for random I/O, the dominant I/O pattern for databases, most unstructured data, and web applications.