Does my server need a high-speed hard drive?

Dedicated servers generally come standard with a 7200 RPM hard drive, but many providers offer faster 10,000 RPM or even 15,000 RPM hard disks for an additional fee. Are these high-speed drives worth the money?

In most cases, no. While faster hard drives do translate to faster read and write times, they will not result in drastically faster performance. This is because the server’s Internet connection acts as a bottleneck.

It’s great if a server can access a file in a few milliseconds, but if it takes 5 seconds to send it across the web, the end user won’t notice the difference. In order to see benefits from a high-speed drive, a very fast uplink connection is needed. A 7200 RPM is fine for most applications.