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Consumer SSDs are very nearly defined as those that do not include the extra hardware necessary for such guarantees; the only other defining feature of a consum
by wtallis 6y ago
Consumer SSDs are very nearly defined as those that do not include the extra hardware necessary for such guarantees; the only other defining feature of a consumer SSD is the presence of low-power idle states. I'm not aware of any current or recent flash-based SSDs marketed at consumers that feature the same kind of power loss protection as enterprise SSDs.
Intel's Optane SSDs don't need power loss protection capacitors because they don't cache writes—their 3D XPoint memory is more or less fast enough to not require it. These drives correctly advertise that they do not have a volatile write cache. I have not encountered a consumer NVMe drive that lies about having a volatile write cache, but I have not attempted to test how they behave when the host requests that the write cache be disabled.
- marcan_42 6y agoConsumer Crucial/Micron drives used to have enough capacitors on board to, at least in my understanding, never corrupt data on power loss (not sure if they flushed the cache, but I think they at least tried and guaranteed sectors wouldn't become unreadable/corrupted due to being partially written). They dropped this in later models, though, but I think they still claim they can guarantee non corruption/partial writes? I stopped trusting Crucial when they released the P1 though. That QLC drive is terrible on every metric. Performance falls off a steep cliff once you do any writes at all, and often never quite recovers. Tail latencies are in the 1 second range, which is insane for an SSD.
- ec109685 6y agoThese folks combine Intel 3D XPoint + QLC to deliver a two-tiered cheep storage solution: https://vastdata.com/ https://vastdata.com/
- loosescrews 6y agoIntel's "Intel® Optane™ Memory H10 with Solid State Storage" is an Optane/QLC flash hybrid drive with an NVMe interface and capacities up to 1TB. It claims to offer enhanced power loss data protection: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/memory-storage/optane-memory/optane-memory-h10-solid-state-storage/optane-memory-h10-32gb-1tb-m-2-80mm.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/memory-stor... I found this review which makes it sound pretty reasonable: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-h10-qlc-flash-optane-caching,6094.html https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-h10-qlc-flash-opt...
- wtallis 6y agoThe Optane half of the H10 doesn't need power loss protection capacitors, and the QLC half of the drive doesn't have room for them. Intel has stated that their caching software for that drive will sometimes send writes directly to the QLC half without buffering them on the Optane half, so the package as a whole does not offer enterprise-grade power loss protection and shouldn't be listed as such.
- fomine3 6y agoSLC cache looks like another consumer feature that not supported on enterprise drives maybe due to inconsistent performance.