3 ms·
fully worn out, i.e the drive has reached its maximum rated P/E cycles. That differs between enterprise and consumer - and the reason why the former is rated h
by userbinator 1y ago
fully worn out, i.e the drive has reached its maximum rated P/E cycles.
That differs between enterprise and consumer - and the reason why the former is rated higher is because they've reduced the retention spec (to almost 1/4th).
But in a real world usage scenario where we subject a consumer SSD and an enterprise SSD to the same number of P/E cycles, would they have different data retention?
No, and that's the whole point of this: the same flash, with different definitions of "worn out", is quite misleading as they're just looking at different points on the same curve. It's all obfuscated marketing.
Incidentally, this is also why those widely-publicised tests that claim SSD endurance is not a problem by continuously writing until absolute failure and seeing many times the rated endurance (e.g. https://linustechtips.com/topic/327024-the-ssd-endurance-experiment-finally-they-are-all-dead/ https://linustechtips.com/topic/327024-the-ssd-endurance-exp... ) are extremely misleading (albeit enlightening on how "enterprise" ratings are being calculated): they are showing how many cycles the flash will take before it's too leaky to store data long enough for the next verification pass, which may be less than an hour away. At that point it's almost behaving more like DRAM than nonvolatile memory.
- daymanstep 1y agoOh wow, yeah I see your point, that is indeed extremely misleading. I had always thought that enterprise SSDs used higher quality flash than consumer SSDs because of the higher endurance guarantees - that was why I bought them. Now I feel like a big reason to buy enterprise SSD has been removed. I am flabbergasted, to be honest. And I feel a bit cheated that I am paying much more for the same quality flash. So would it be fair to say that the only reason to pay for the enterprise SSD premium is the power loss protection and more reliable firmware?
- wtallis 1y agoDefinitely don't think of enterprise vs consumer SSDs as good vs bad; they're optimizing for different use cases. Enterprise SSDs get you power loss protection and firmware QA aimed at server workloads and operating systems, and performance tuning prioritizing consistent sustained performance, and larger form factors with enabling higher capacity and higher power. Consumer SSDs get you higher peak performance (eg. SLC caching) and orders of magnitude better idle power savings and QA against Windows and its NVMe driver, in form factors suitable for laptops and not requiring direct airflow over the SSD. A very long time ago when the SSD market was still quite immature, there was a time period where "consumer" SSDs were little more than cut-down enterprise SSDs with inferior NAND and fewer features. But that changed well before NVMe showed up.