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> How many studies have been done verifying that enterprise SSDs perform significantly better than consumer SSDs in any metrics? Define perform. But short answ
by nmjohn 10y ago
> How many studies have been done verifying that enterprise SSDs perform significantly better than consumer SSDs in any metrics?
Define perform. But short answer, lots.
To be fair, consumer SSDs these days are pretty solid, and will perform great for most workloads - even many workloads which enterprise drives would be used for.
The big difference though, is with extremely heavy write workloads. The endurance of enterprise SSDs in terms of how much data you can write before the drive will fail, is a couple orders of magnitude greater than consumer drives. For example, I have an 800gb Intel S3710 SSD. It's rated to handle 10 DWPD (drive writes per day) - meaning that one could write 8,000 gigabytes of data a day, 365 days a year, for 5 years (~17 petabytes), and the drive will still be chugging away just fine.
A 1TB Samsung 850 Pro (which has some of best endurance of consumer ssds), on the other hand is only rated to 300 terabytes of data written. So the enterprise drive has a 60x improvement in endurance.
- ilaksh 10y agoDo those ratings reflect actual tested durability or mainly marketing? What is the real average durability requirement? Have there not been some relatively large providers using consumer SSDs in the datacenter successfully for some time?
- nmjohn 10y ago> Do those ratings reflect actual tested durability or mainly marketing? They reflect what the manufacturers will offer the warranty until. A quick google search suggests about 2 petabytes of writes is the max you can get on a samsung 850 before it completely fails (and after 1 petabyte you will have many failed sectors and data corruption starts creeping in) At the same time, I bought my S3710 used and when I got it, it had almost 8 petabytes written and it's still just like new. > Have there not been some relatively large providers using consumer SSDs in the datacenter successfully for some time? Yes, that wouldn't surprise me at all. Like I said, for many workloads, consumer SSDs are acceptable. But that doesn't mean enterprise drives are a scam.
- wmf 10y agoI noticed that the Samsung 960s are rated at almost exactly 0.3 DWPD, which happens to be the standard endurance for "read-optimized" SSDs, even across different generations of flash. This looks more like market segmentation than a measurement.
- userbinator 10y agoIt's rated to handle 10 DWPD (drive writes per day) - meaning that one could write 8,000 gigabytes of data a day, 365 days a year, for 5 years (~17 petabytes), and the drive will still be chugging away just fine. It actually means something more like "we don't feel confident that the drive will last more than 5 years at 8TB/day." --- and if you do the maths, assuming perfectly even wear, this means they're rating the flash at ~20K cycles/cell, which sounds a bit ambitious for 20nm MLC considering that ~10K cycles was the norm for 65nm MLC several years ago. 1TB Samsung 850 Pro (which has some of best endurance of consumer ssds), on the other hand is only rated to 300 terabytes of data written. That totals around 300 cycles/cell, which seems like 3-bit/cell ("TLC") flash to me, or cheap small-process MLC.