4 ms·

I do believe your experience, but started wondering what makes an enterprise drive more reliable than a consumer-targeted one. What's preventing the manufacture

I do believe your experience, but started wondering what makes an enterprise drive more reliable than a consumer-targeted one. What's preventing the manufacturers from selling the same drive with two different names and prices? Reputation?

mirimir 8y ago
One difference is that enterprise drives have lots more spare capacity. Like >>100%.
- u02sgb 8y ago
  This can be replicated in consumer drives by underprovisioning.
  - mirimir 8y ago
    OK, fair point. Although I don't know enough about SSDs to know whether there's more to it. But what else is different?
    - u02sgb 8y ago
      I think mainly warranty, although other posters are saying enterprise drives have capacitors to help with writing during power loss. I'd have thought a good battery backed raid controller would handle this but "enterprise"="belt and braces" so I can see why a lot of businesses pay the extra.
      - mirimir 8y ago
        Right. Capacitors. Especially for write cache, I think. But yeah, battery-backed RAID plus UPS would be good enough for most, I guess.
      - tinus_hn 8y ago
        So the enterprise drives perform as specified and the consumer drives don’t?
        candiodari 8y ago
        If you actually read the specification on consumer drives you'll see they're "guaranteed" for like 100 rewrites and you don't have any right to anything if they fail. Which should be a hint as to what's coming.
        u02sgb 8y ago
        Sorry, late to reply! The warranty differences are things like with enterprise they'll send you a new one as soon as the SMART data suggests it's going to fail. Consumer is usually you post it back and they send you a new one.
freddie_mercury 8y ago
It would quickly become very obvious. And then they'd be sued for a lot of money.
xfitm3 8y ago
Enterprise class disks have significant behavioral differences when dealing with a bad sector, among other differences. Intel has a good paper on this subject. See 3.2.1: https://www.intel.com/content/dam/support/us/en/documents/server-products/Enterprise_vs_Desktop_HDDs_2.0.pdf#page10 https://www.intel.com/content/dam/support/us/en/documents/se...

mirimir 8y ago

One difference is that enterprise drives have lots more spare capacity. Like >>100%.

u02sgb 8y ago
This can be replicated in consumer drives by underprovisioning.
- mirimir 8y ago
  OK, fair point. Although I don't know enough about SSDs to know whether there's more to it. But what else is different?
  - u02sgb 8y ago
    I think mainly warranty, although other posters are saying enterprise drives have capacitors to help with writing during power loss. I'd have thought a good battery backed raid controller would handle this but "enterprise"="belt and braces" so I can see why a lot of businesses pay the extra.
    - mirimir 8y ago
      Right. Capacitors. Especially for write cache, I think. But yeah, battery-backed RAID plus UPS would be good enough for most, I guess.
    - tinus_hn 8y ago
      So the enterprise drives perform as specified and the consumer drives don’t?
      - candiodari 8y ago
        If you actually read the specification on consumer drives you'll see they're "guaranteed" for like 100 rewrites and you don't have any right to anything if they fail. Which should be a hint as to what's coming.
      - u02sgb 8y ago
        Sorry, late to reply! The warranty differences are things like with enterprise they'll send you a new one as soon as the SMART data suggests it's going to fail. Consumer is usually you post it back and they send you a new one.

freddie_mercury 8y ago

It would quickly become very obvious. And then they'd be sued for a lot of money.

xfitm3 8y ago

Enterprise class disks have significant behavioral differences when dealing with a bad sector, among other differences. Intel has a good paper on this subject. See 3.2.1: https://www.intel.com/content/dam/support/us/en/documents/server-products/Enterprise_vs_Desktop_HDDs_2.0.pdf#page10 https://www.intel.com/content/dam/support/us/en/documents/se...