7 ms·

The price, considering the specs, doesn't make any sense. I already can buy SSDs under 45 cents/GB, with more IOPS and faster sequential writes.

lightbyte 10y ago
The price may be related to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13107569 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13107569
- imaginenore 10y ago
  But still, you can go to Amazon and get something like this: https://amzn.com/B01IAGSD68 https://amzn.com/B01IAGSD68 at 22 cents/GB, 510/530 read/write speeds, 92K/83K random read/writes.
  - omh 10y ago
    The extra cost is for the enterprise features. For example the MX300 quotes endurance of 200-300TB. The 5100 is several times that - up to 17PB. If you're running a database server then you might need that endurance.
    - mSparks 10y ago
      Not sure i buy into that. Sounds a lot like sales talk. Be interesting to see how they compare with these guys: http://techreport.com/review/27436/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-two-freaking-petabytes http://techreport.com/review/27436/the-ssd-endurance-experim... and, afaik, for enterprise, sas hdd still leads ssd in performance price and endurance.
      - wmf 10y ago
        Endurance of consumer SSDs may be derated for marketing reasons, but there are also physical differences that give enterprise SSDs higher endurance. A consumer 240 GB SSD has 256 GB of flash, while an enterprise 240 GB SSD may have 512 GB of flash. More flash allows more writes and the effect is nonlinear because FTLs are more efficient with more free space.
        mSparks 10y ago
        I was commenting less "consumer v enterprise" and more "consumer vs consumer that pretends they are enterprise". Enterprise servers are mostly sas interfaces. These are sata, which is mostly home and soho plus a few startups running on a shoe string (afaik)
        wmf 10y ago
        A SATA SSD with capacitors, high endurance, and a good warranty is not "consumer that pretends they are enterprise". It's actually better. Really the only advantage of SAS is dual port and some customers don't need that.
        mSparks 10y ago
        The benefit of 15k SAS drives is 250MBs per drive actual throughput, even more because they are RAID arrays - for 3c a GB, they are HIGHER performance than most SSD drives on the market. Sticking "enterprise" on the box will not make enterprise pay 42c per gig for less performance.
        NathanOsullivan 10y ago
        In general enterprise SSDs are not using SAS, they are either NVME or SATA. For example, intel's datacenter range https://www-ssl.intel.com/content/www/au/en/solid-state-drives/data-center-family.html https://www-ssl.intel.com/content/www/au/en/solid-state-driv... has no SAS drives.
        mSparks 10y ago
        in gerneral enterprise is not using ssds. so you kinda missed the point. and when the hardware they plug into is a sas interface, they arent going to be buying them either. seriously, getting a bit tired of the immaturity and shilly nonsense on here. check any rack machine from cisco, dell or any of the other big enterprise suppliers (of which intel is an oem, they dont really deal with the likes of hsbc or shell corporation) and they all come with sas interface for storage. enterprise means "more than 10000 employees". you do have dedicated support personel from your supplier. intels "data center range" definately isnt enterprise imho. enterprises still not stupid enough to go anywhere near the cloud.
  - basch 10y ago
    "Dynamic Write acceleration" means its TLC nand emulating SLC nand. At some point your write saturates the buffer and you lose the speed advantage. The MX series have a dynamically expanding buffer (unlike samsung evos and other competition which have a static sized buffer,) but its not infinite.
  - wtallis 10y ago
    The sustained random write speed of that drive is more like 6600 IOPS, even though its burst performance in ideal conditions is close to what's specified.
Declanomous 10y ago
These drives have several enterprise-specific features. Like most enterprise hardware, you are paying a premium for these features. If you need these features, then you will pay the price premium. If you don't need these features, then the drive will seem overpriced.
Qantourisc 10y ago
This one has capacitors and probably guarantees that what the SSD has acknowledged was actually saved. EDIT: also often these are guaranteed IOPS, so no stalling on the numbers due to garbage collection or such.
- mtanski 10y ago
  Also, any kind of workload that involves a sync for durability and correctness. In enterprise drives the drive can return quickly even if it's in the buffer because there's enough charge in the capacitor to whiteout to NAND from RAM in the event of power failure (hard reboot or power loss). The consumer drive absent the capacitor either has poor fsync performance or lies about syncs. There are people who run consumer drives in data centers due to the low GB/$ cost of them or they have applications that are not sensitive for data loss or were engineered to deal with it (replication, journaling, etc..). You won't want to run your important database on such a drive.
  - olavgg 10y ago
    This is absolutely true, you can for example run pg_test_fsync to test your fsync performance. On Ubuntu, if you have installed PostgreSQL this is available at /usr/lib/postgresql/9.5/bin/pg_test_fsync I get 4000 IOPS on my old Intel 320, which beats the crap out of most "top" performers on the consumer side today.
beachstartup 10y ago
and i'm sure they're just fantastic for your gaming rig, but wouldn't survive 2 or 3 years in a datacenter. they will literally all fail.
cjensen 10y ago
These are Enterprise class drives. In SSDs, the big difference between Enterprise and Consumer is endurance. Flash memory wears out over time and the firmware manages the wear and maps out bad sectors over time. Eventually, too much wears out and the drive can no longer be written to, or is too slow to usably write to. The endurance spec tells you how much data you can expect to write before the drive must be replaced. Micron sells both consumer and enterprise drives. The consumer 1100 SSDs max out at 400TB endurance which is fantastic for a consumer drive. These enterprise 5100 drives max out at 17.6PB endurance -- that's 44X better! If you have an application which writes a lot of data, you should be evaluating whether or not you need something like this.
- tamcap 10y ago
  Hasn't there been an article on HN recently that showed consumer grade drive endurance testing? I believe many exceeded the endurance spec manyfold.
  - Avitas 10y ago
    That was the TechReport website. Here's a link: http://techreport.com/review/27436/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-two-freaking-petabytes http://techreport.com/review/27436/the-ssd-endurance-experim...
  - cjensen 10y ago
    There is some uncertainty in the numbers, so the manufacturers quote fairly conservative numbers. In recent years flash cells have become a bit more fragile and the process technology has changed multiple times, so good past results on endurance testing are not necessarily indicative of future results. I've personally burnt out a set of SSDs installed in a RAID-6. They lost no data and failed no writes, but they had become unusably slow -- less than a tenth of their original write speed.
    - wtallis 10y ago
      What kind of SSDs were these, and how much writing had they been subjected to? If the flash was really wearing out, I'd expect read performance to also suffer significantly as LDPC soft decode error correction was required to recover the data intact. If only write speed was degrading and if you weren't thoroughly hammering the drives with writes around the clock, then you might merely have filled up the drives with a RAID configuration that didn't pass through TRIM commands.
late2part 10y ago
I concur. Street price on an Enterprise Samsung PM863 is under $1k, so this Micron announcement seems like not as good of a product for more money.

lightbyte 10y ago

The price may be related to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13107569 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13107569

imaginenore 10y ago
But still, you can go to Amazon and get something like this: https://amzn.com/B01IAGSD68 https://amzn.com/B01IAGSD68 at 22 cents/GB, 510/530 read/write speeds, 92K/83K random read/writes.
- omh 10y ago
  The extra cost is for the enterprise features. For example the MX300 quotes endurance of 200-300TB. The 5100 is several times that - up to 17PB. If you're running a database server then you might need that endurance.
  - mSparks 10y ago
    Not sure i buy into that. Sounds a lot like sales talk. Be interesting to see how they compare with these guys: http://techreport.com/review/27436/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-two-freaking-petabytes http://techreport.com/review/27436/the-ssd-endurance-experim... and, afaik, for enterprise, sas hdd still leads ssd in performance price and endurance.
    - wmf 10y ago
      Endurance of consumer SSDs may be derated for marketing reasons, but there are also physical differences that give enterprise SSDs higher endurance. A consumer 240 GB SSD has 256 GB of flash, while an enterprise 240 GB SSD may have 512 GB of flash. More flash allows more writes and the effect is nonlinear because FTLs are more efficient with more free space.
      - mSparks 10y ago
        I was commenting less "consumer v enterprise" and more "consumer vs consumer that pretends they are enterprise". Enterprise servers are mostly sas interfaces. These are sata, which is mostly home and soho plus a few startups running on a shoe string (afaik)
        wmf 10y ago
        A SATA SSD with capacitors, high endurance, and a good warranty is not "consumer that pretends they are enterprise". It's actually better. Really the only advantage of SAS is dual port and some customers don't need that.
        mSparks 10y ago
        The benefit of 15k SAS drives is 250MBs per drive actual throughput, even more because they are RAID arrays - for 3c a GB, they are HIGHER performance than most SSD drives on the market. Sticking "enterprise" on the box will not make enterprise pay 42c per gig for less performance.
        NathanOsullivan 10y ago
        In general enterprise SSDs are not using SAS, they are either NVME or SATA. For example, intel's datacenter range https://www-ssl.intel.com/content/www/au/en/solid-state-drives/data-center-family.html https://www-ssl.intel.com/content/www/au/en/solid-state-driv... has no SAS drives.
        mSparks 10y ago
        in gerneral enterprise is not using ssds. so you kinda missed the point. and when the hardware they plug into is a sas interface, they arent going to be buying them either. seriously, getting a bit tired of the immaturity and shilly nonsense on here. check any rack machine from cisco, dell or any of the other big enterprise suppliers (of which intel is an oem, they dont really deal with the likes of hsbc or shell corporation) and they all come with sas interface for storage. enterprise means "more than 10000 employees". you do have dedicated support personel from your supplier. intels "data center range" definately isnt enterprise imho. enterprises still not stupid enough to go anywhere near the cloud.
- basch 10y ago
  "Dynamic Write acceleration" means its TLC nand emulating SLC nand. At some point your write saturates the buffer and you lose the speed advantage. The MX series have a dynamically expanding buffer (unlike samsung evos and other competition which have a static sized buffer,) but its not infinite.
- wtallis 10y ago
  The sustained random write speed of that drive is more like 6600 IOPS, even though its burst performance in ideal conditions is close to what's specified.

Declanomous 10y ago

These drives have several enterprise-specific features. Like most enterprise hardware, you are paying a premium for these features. If you need these features, then you will pay the price premium. If you don't need these features, then the drive will seem overpriced.

Qantourisc 10y ago

This one has capacitors and probably guarantees that what the SSD has acknowledged was actually saved. EDIT: also often these are guaranteed IOPS, so no stalling on the numbers due to garbage collection or such.

mtanski 10y ago
Also, any kind of workload that involves a sync for durability and correctness. In enterprise drives the drive can return quickly even if it's in the buffer because there's enough charge in the capacitor to whiteout to NAND from RAM in the event of power failure (hard reboot or power loss). The consumer drive absent the capacitor either has poor fsync performance or lies about syncs. There are people who run consumer drives in data centers due to the low GB/$ cost of them or they have applications that are not sensitive for data loss or were engineered to deal with it (replication, journaling, etc..). You won't want to run your important database on such a drive.
- olavgg 10y ago
  This is absolutely true, you can for example run pg_test_fsync to test your fsync performance. On Ubuntu, if you have installed PostgreSQL this is available at /usr/lib/postgresql/9.5/bin/pg_test_fsync I get 4000 IOPS on my old Intel 320, which beats the crap out of most "top" performers on the consumer side today.

beachstartup 10y ago

and i'm sure they're just fantastic for your gaming rig, but wouldn't survive 2 or 3 years in a datacenter. they will literally all fail.

cjensen 10y ago

These are Enterprise class drives. In SSDs, the big difference between Enterprise and Consumer is endurance. Flash memory wears out over time and the firmware manages the wear and maps out bad sectors over time. Eventually, too much wears out and the drive can no longer be written to, or is too slow to usably write to. The endurance spec tells you how much data you can expect to write before the drive must be replaced. Micron sells both consumer and enterprise drives. The consumer 1100 SSDs max out at 400TB endurance which is fantastic for a consumer drive. These enterprise 5100 drives max out at 17.6PB endurance -- that's 44X better! If you have an application which writes a lot of data, you should be evaluating whether or not you need something like this.

tamcap 10y ago
Hasn't there been an article on HN recently that showed consumer grade drive endurance testing? I believe many exceeded the endurance spec manyfold.
- Avitas 10y ago
  That was the TechReport website. Here's a link: http://techreport.com/review/27436/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-two-freaking-petabytes http://techreport.com/review/27436/the-ssd-endurance-experim...
- cjensen 10y ago
  There is some uncertainty in the numbers, so the manufacturers quote fairly conservative numbers. In recent years flash cells have become a bit more fragile and the process technology has changed multiple times, so good past results on endurance testing are not necessarily indicative of future results. I've personally burnt out a set of SSDs installed in a RAID-6. They lost no data and failed no writes, but they had become unusably slow -- less than a tenth of their original write speed.
  - wtallis 10y ago
    What kind of SSDs were these, and how much writing had they been subjected to? If the flash was really wearing out, I'd expect read performance to also suffer significantly as LDPC soft decode error correction was required to recover the data intact. If only write speed was degrading and if you weren't thoroughly hammering the drives with writes around the clock, then you might merely have filled up the drives with a RAID configuration that didn't pass through TRIM commands.

late2part 10y ago

I concur. Street price on an Enterprise Samsung PM863 is under $1k, so this Micron announcement seems like not as good of a product for more money.