Elasticsearch using SSD vs HDD comparison

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
1

Hello,

I wonder if there are good blog or page describes Elasticsearch performance comparison with SSD vs HDD.

I know Elasticsearch recommends SSD for better performance, but if there are comparison information in detail btw using SSD and HDD, it would be very helpful.

  • here is my use case. i will use them with xpack platinum license for anomaly detection.
    using SSD is better for "searching" or "indexing" performance improvement? please advise.

thank you!

2

I am not aware of any direct comparisons. SSDs generally provide far better disk I/O than even fast spinning disks, especially for random access loads. If you run a benchmark where you push Elasticsearch to the limit with a mixed indexing and query load, a cluster backed by SSDs will in my experience perform much better. It will depend a lot on the use case though.

A lot of use-cases do however not necessarily operate Elasticsearch at peak performance. For a lot of large scale use cases, especially where data has a long retention period, running clusters on spinning disks is perfectly fine. I would therefore recommend you run some realistic benchmarks to see which fit your use case best or provide some additional details about your use case to get more accurate estimates.

3

thank you for your reply.

"especially where data has a long retention period, running clusters on spinning disks is perfectly fine."

my logstash creates "daily" based index, and about 80% query performed against to the latest index.

i would understand more why a long retention period data is good with spinning disk. so, daily based index is always better with ssd?

4

I am assuming that you want to use a significant portion of your storage. Spinning disks typically has a lot of storage but low I/O performance, which means that the will only support a relatively low indexing/query rate compared to SSDs. If you have a short retention period and want to use all the storage available, you may need to index more data every day than the spinning disks can support. This is why I recommend spinning disks for use cases with longer retention periods where a lot of the data sits idle on disk for long periods.

Does that make sense?

5

Yes! :grinning:thank you for all replies!

6

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