While the enterprise vs consumer distictions seems to have been mostly a labeling and market segmentation exercise of the past (now we have a more differentiate

While the enterprise vs consumer distictions seems to have been mostly a labeling and market segmentation exercise of the past (now we have a more differentiated landscape with NAS 24/7 etc), the story for SSDs is different. From the technology side, there is at least the amount of extra flash that the drive contains and that it can use for better performance and longer life times (TBW rating). Our anecdotal experience is that there is quite a noticable difference between drives: - 99.5 percentile latency during normal operations. Some enterprise drives guarantee response times, others are all over the place. Note that consumer drives often claim a much higher maximum IOPS rating whereas you can get enterprise drives with a sustained rating. - drives hanging for >60s, presumably during internal cleanup. - firmware stability, drive getting unresponsive when maxing it out over longer periods.