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If you want cheap-ish, EXTREMELY reliable, and "pretty fast" there's always the Intel P "datacenter" series. You can find a lot of PCIe variants on eBay[0] and

If you want cheap-ish, EXTREMELY reliable, and "pretty fast" there's always the Intel P "datacenter" series. You can find a lot of PCIe variants on eBay[0] and elsewhere. Yes used typically != reliable but listings will include drive life/use percentages and many of them are > 90%. You can and should verify this upon receipt. As one example the Intel P3700 can do 17 full drive writes per day[1] over five years! With a MTBF of 2 million hours (230 years). Over the years I've used these as my boot/OS drives and I've never seen one fail. Yes, 5-10x the price of the extremely cheap drives in this post but all in all not bad if you just don't want a drive to fail. [0] - https://www.ebay.com/itm/295520377095?hash=item44ce631907:g:4HUAAOSwAApkGLZg&amdata=enc%3AAQAHAAAA4AOwfJpVtM1zJ5aBq0QBojxfR%2BLX71HRkTRGm7y6f38yLZp4XOyd9IcMkINcscu9GP%2FazzAQsolaYdNzAVKrjeFdVwNUyA6FVHOTt6BFrrbJDs465jcFrR4FS1HiLLl%2BUQUQh%2FsehZZyilmoH9TeIHMWB52oTKRqJDxgbQxz07e5fmXZYn6wv1Gc7wyBjV5dzKYc4pgz%2BBmjH5Awbz%2BaRmWmyHMkHxL9PFribWzSe2Dl2mw9KNbew4tzJDKLCK%2F8JcO%2FJ50TkTlSfs2tIEwA1egod8zMkEjIcCbxX8rSv8Pr%7Ctkp%3ABk9SR_Tct7jkYQ https://www.ebay.com/itm/295520377095?hash=item44ce631907:g:... [1] - https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/product-briefs/intel-ssd-dc-family-for-pcie-brief.pdf https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents...

leonidasv 4y ago
Genuine question: how those Datacenter-class SSDs manage that insane TBW? Samsung's 970 Pro, which was the last (consumer) MLC "Pro" drive by Samsung, got only about 800 TBW for a 1TB drive. Do they overprovision memory cells on those SSDs? Or are the cells just larger in order to sustain more wear over time?
- wtallis 4y ago
  Datacenter drives tend to have a bit more overprovisioning (ie. 960GB usable capacity rather than 1000GB). They also don't usually do SLC caching. They also grade write endurance based on different criteria: consumer SSDs are supposed to be able to retain their data for a full year after reaching the end of their write endurance, but enterprise SSDs only need to have 3 months data retention at end of life (albeit at a higher temperature). But mostly, it's a matter of the consumer drives having low-balled ratings so that they don't cannibalize sales of the enterprise drives. Because the write endurance ratings are more about when the warranty expires than about when the memory itself is actually worn out.

leonidasv 4y ago

Genuine question: how those Datacenter-class SSDs manage that insane TBW? Samsung's 970 Pro, which was the last (consumer) MLC "Pro" drive by Samsung, got only about 800 TBW for a 1TB drive. Do they overprovision memory cells on those SSDs? Or are the cells just larger in order to sustain more wear over time?

wtallis 4y ago
Datacenter drives tend to have a bit more overprovisioning (ie. 960GB usable capacity rather than 1000GB). They also don't usually do SLC caching. They also grade write endurance based on different criteria: consumer SSDs are supposed to be able to retain their data for a full year after reaching the end of their write endurance, but enterprise SSDs only need to have 3 months data retention at end of life (albeit at a higher temperature). But mostly, it's a matter of the consumer drives having low-balled ratings so that they don't cannibalize sales of the enterprise drives. Because the write endurance ratings are more about when the warranty expires than about when the memory itself is actually worn out.