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      01-10-2017, 08:50 PM   #46
zx10guy
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Quote:
Originally Posted by P1et View Post
I was looking at the Intel SSDs. Are those more for enterprise use vs. home use? I understand SSDs have a somewhat limited lifespan, and unless I'm mistaken, the Intel or Micron drives will outlast drives such as the Samsung EVOs?
I think Intel makes a consumer line along with Micron.

Intel unfortunately only has SATA SSDs on the market in the 2.5" form factor. The 2.5" SSDs I have as samples from Intel are in their enterprise line. One of the models I have is the S3710. Build quality is much better than your consumer SSD drive even the heralded Samsung EVOs. The enclosure of the S3710 is pretty thick aluminum. It's almost a block of aluminum. What you've stated about life span is correct concerning SSDs. Enterprise drives have a rating called DWPD (drive writes per day). A drive which is rated as 1 DWPD with a capacity of 250GB means the drive can sustain 250GB of data written to it daily for I think a minimum of 3 years if not 5. The higher quality enterprise drives will have at least a rating of 3 DWPD and some times higher.

DWPD is one differentiation for enterprise drives. Another is dealing with garbage collection. Consumer grade drives lean heavily on the OS to have TRIM functionality to clean up flash cells with data marked for deletion. Enterprise drives have their own garbage collection functionality which assists in clearing out flash cells with data marked to be deleted. Depending on the I/O profile, the OS may not initiate TRIM before more write I/O is dumped onto the SSD. This causes a phenomena called the "write cliff" write performance literally drops off the cliff when the SSD reaches capacity and has to have marked cells cleared off.

Another aspect of enterprise SSDs is the thin provisioning. When you buy an enterprise SSD, you're actually buying a bit more capacity than what the drive is rated for. So I'm making up numbers but say you buy that same 250GB enterprise drive. The actual capacity on the drive is 275GB. But you're locked out of utilizing the extra 25GB of storage. The reason the drive has this phantom space is to enable the ability to do wear leveling. It's also there to maintain performance when the drive itself is doing garbage collection so performance won't take a hit as there will always be enough available space to write to without waiting for garbage collection to free up additional space.
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