# Elasticsearch performance in HDD vs SSD and 32 GB vs 64 GB of RAM
**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/elasticsearch-performance-in-hdd-vs-ssd-and-32-gb-vs-64-gb-of-ram/334622
**Category:** Elasticsearch
**Created:** [May 29, 2023, 9:37pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/elasticsearch-performance-in-hdd-vs-ssd-and-32-gb-vs-64-gb-of-ram/334622 "2023-05-29T21:37:39Z")
**Posts on this page:** 6
**Page:** 2
### Author:  [@DavidTurner](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/DavidTurner)
#### Post date: [June 2, 2023, 8:45am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/elasticsearch-performance-in-hdd-vs-ssd-and-32-gb-vs-64-gb-of-ram/334622/21 "2023-06-02T08:45:01Z")
> [@Don\_Boscow](#):
>
> Is there a ballpark figure for how much additional space the index can occupy on hard disk (in addition to being stored in 64 GB of RAM) when 2 TB of data is indexed in ES?
This blog post, while old, is still about right. TLDR disk usage will often be within a factor of 2 of the input data size (either way) depending on the data and the mappings
> **[Part 2.0: The true story behind Elasticsearch storage requirements](https://www.elastic.co/blog/elasticsearch-storage-the-true-story-2.0)**
> [@Don\_Boscow](#):
>
> In the same vein, if we are indexing images through vectors in ES
Don't store large binary data like images in ES, it's a waste of your valuable in-cluster resources. Put them somewhere cheaper, with a link stored in ES which points to the binary data. You can _index_ them if you want to use vector search, just don't _store_ them there. See [store | Elasticsearch Guide [8.11] | Elastic](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/mapping-store.html) for a little more info on the difference.
---
### Author:  [@Don\_Boscow](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Don_Boscow)
#### Post date: [June 2, 2023, 9:01am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/elasticsearch-performance-in-hdd-vs-ssd-and-32-gb-vs-64-gb-of-ram/334622/22 "2023-06-02T09:01:42Z")
Thanks David. Yes, that sounds like a good idea. We can store the images in S3 or some other storage and do just the indexing, classifying elsewhere. Just curious - the accompanying Medium article (for some reason I am unable to paste the link here, the post is flagged) seemed very promising. This was obviously a basic idea, to make a proper image search engine, we have to employ a combination of sophisticated NLP, vector feature extraction, self-supervised classification, random forests, etc. Will all this be possible by just running the classification, feature extraction, etc. on ES while the actual images are stored in a different server, like S3, for serving to the end user?
---
### Author:  [@Don\_Boscow](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Don_Boscow)
#### Post date: [June 2, 2023, 9:03am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/elasticsearch-performance-in-hdd-vs-ssd-and-32-gb-vs-64-gb-of-ram/334622/23 "2023-06-02T09:03:45Z")
Thanks. I won't. I will stick to 50 GB shard sizes as you and others have explained in this post. I was using this just as an example. My concern is that server with SSD and high RAM (~64 GB) is very expensive, so I need a way to have an idea of how much space I might end up needing to index 5 PB of data (plus its replicas, assuming only one replica for now), so that I can estimate the potential cost of such an endeavour.
---
### Author:  [@DavidTurner](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/DavidTurner)
#### Post date: [June 2, 2023, 9:40am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/elasticsearch-performance-in-hdd-vs-ssd-and-32-gb-vs-64-gb-of-ram/334622/24 "2023-06-02T09:40:39Z")
> [@Don\_Boscow](#):
>
> Will all this be possible by just running the classification, feature extraction, etc. on ES while the actual images are stored in a different server, like S3, for serving to the end user?
Not sure, this is outside my area of expertise. I would hope so, but you might do better to open a separate thread on this question because the experts in this area have probably stopped reading this thread by now.
---
### Author:  [@Don\_Boscow](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Don_Boscow)
#### Post date: [June 2, 2023, 9:47am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/elasticsearch-performance-in-hdd-vs-ssd-and-32-gb-vs-64-gb-of-ram/334622/25 "2023-06-02T09:47:22Z")
Got it. Thanks a lot, David. You opened up my mind towards an area I wouldn't have thought of by myself! 🙂
---
### Author:  [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)
#### Post date: [June 30, 2023, 9:48am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/elasticsearch-performance-in-hdd-vs-ssd-and-32-gb-vs-64-gb-of-ram/334622/26 "2023-06-30T09:48:00Z")
This topic was automatically closed 28 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.
[Previous page](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/elasticsearch-performance-in-hdd-vs-ssd-and-32-gb-vs-64-gb-of-ram/334622.md?page=1)