Consumer Grade SSDs vs Enterprise Grade SSDs
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@Dashrender unless you write a zillion gigs a day, which I don't think he'll do
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@StrongBad if they don't last longer what good is a warranty? what's the value in that?
I thought enterprise SSD had insane written data life
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@StrongBad said:
@Dashrender said:
I think we are saying that enterprise drives no longer make sense?
They make a lot of sense but have to be approached from that perspective. They are not needed for normal wear and tear reasons. That is not their value. The value of enterprise drives is in the integrated support that they provide. Same as it has always been for spinning rust. Spinning rust enterprise drives don't last longer, they have good warranties. It is the warranty that justifies the extra cost.
The warranties - I don't think i can give you that one. Many consumer drives today do or can come with 5 year warranties. The special firmware is the question in my mind.
And, if the cost is really that much lower, replacing drives at 2:1 or even 3:1 could still be a cost savings, and that whole time value of money thing.
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@Dashrender said:
The warranties - I don't think i can give you that one. Many consumer drives today do or can come with 5 year warranties. The special firmware is the question in my mind.
The value of the warranty is the tech who runs to the site in four hours, with the part to swap and does the labor for you. Have you priced out the cost of doing a warranty replacement of an SSD in a datacenter? You have to buy the replacement drive with your own money, drive to the data center, replace the drive, and then do an RMA on the drive.
Enterprise warranties are the same value today that they have always been. When you need them, nothing compares.
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OK to TL;DR this whole rigamarole
Enterprise SSD - massive write lifetimes, measured usually in terabytes written per day
http://www.hgst.com/products/solid-state-drives/ultrastar-ssd800mhbConsumer SSD - usually 1/10 to 1/1000'th the write life time of Enterprise SSD's, measured in gigabytes written per day or terabytes written in it's lifetime.
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@StrongBad said:
@Dashrender said:
The warranties - I don't think i can give you that one. Many consumer drives today do or can come with 5 year warranties. The special firmware is the question in my mind.
The value of the warranty is the tech who runs to the site in four hours, with the part to swap and does the labor for you. Have you priced out the cost of doing a warranty replacement of an SSD in a datacenter? You have to buy the replacement drive with your own money, drive to the data center, replace the drive, and then do an RMA on the drive.
Enterprise warranties are the same value today that they have always been. When you need them, nothing compares.
Interesting take - but we're not talking about a datacenter install here, we're talking about an onsite server. And for the cost of the enterprise, I could have a spare or two of the consumer sitting on the self (and still a ton of savings).
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@DustinB3403 If you're writing 20GB/day to the SSD array you are very very very comfortably within the capabilities of consumer SSD's and you would have little to gain by splashing out for Enterprise drives.
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Put like eight SSDs in RAID 5, have a good memory cache in front of them and you are looking at write lifetimes heading towards a millennium!
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@Dashrender said:
If he has 6 TB of used storage today, and we assume that will be mostly static, and we add 12 GB a day - again as static files
Just because the amount of data stays about the same does not mean it's static data, every time a user opens a file and saves it will re-write that whole file to the SSD.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Put like eight SSDs in RAID 5, have a good memory cache in front of them and you are looking at write lifetimes heading towards a millennium!
I really want to edit this ever so slightly and put it on a t-shirt for spiceworld
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@Jason said:
@Dashrender said:
If he has 6 TB of used storage today, and we assume that will be mostly static, and we add 12 GB a day - again as static files
Just because the amount of data stays about the same does not mean it's static data, every time a user opens a file and saves it will re-write that whole file to the SSD.
That depends on the filesystem, cache and other factors. But it could certainly be happening.
If I do that on Linux, it does not do that by default. If I "echo 'a new line' >> /tmp/somefile" it does not rewrite the whole file, it just appends.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Put like eight SSDs in RAID 5, have a good memory cache in front of them and you are looking at write lifetimes heading towards a millennium!
I'm tempted to buy one of those 8bay drobo SANs (cause it's the cheapest I can find) and put all consumer SSDs in it. Maybe I can find another SAN cheaper on ebay (for home use of course) with my Dell servers.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Put like eight HDDs in RAID 5 and you are looking at data lifetimes heading towards a millennium!
That should do it - I'd sell out of shirts.
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@Jason said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Put like eight SSDs in RAID 5, have a good memory cache in front of them and you are looking at write lifetimes heading towards a millennium!
I'm tempted to buy one of those 8bay drobo SANs (cause it's the cheapest I can find) and put all consumer SSDs in it. Maybe I can find another SAN cheaper on ebay (for home use of course) with my Dell servers.
You still have to worry about the SAN itself dying. Just because the drives will last forever doesn't mean that the SAN will
We have a Drobo B800i SAN, it is actually a neat little 3U unit. -
Drobo B800i are not too practical for SSDs only because of the form factor of the bays.
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@Dashrender said:
Interesting take - but we're not talking about a datacenter install here, we're talking about an onsite server. And for the cost of the enterprise, I could have a spare or two of the consumer sitting on the self (and still a ton of savings).
What if he wants to have his backup system offsite?
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My complaint earlier this year:
https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/895156-ssds-and-how-can-hp-and-dell-justify-their-pricesI think I saw someone where the replacement drive for one of the HPs was actually an Intel drive. This stuff grinds my gears.
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@StrongBad said:
@Dashrender said:
Interesting take - but we're not talking about a datacenter install here, we're talking about an onsite server. And for the cost of the enterprise, I could have a spare or two of the consumer sitting on the self (and still a ton of savings).
What if he wants to have his backup system offsite?
The whole thing? In this case that's probably practical, but we aren't completely sure.
We've already discussed how he has 12 GB of changes a day. Over a 30 Mb up pipe that takes approximately 1 hour to do. Depending on what the hourly changes are, that would be completely doable to a remote located backup system.
But, if he's replicating from a local backup server to an offsite backup server,t this would still be doable, though he might be at 2 hours for RPO (how much lost data).
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@DenisKelley said:
I think I saw someone where the replacement drive for one of the HPs was actually an Intel drive. This stuff grinds my gears.
What's wrong with Intel for SSD drives? There are only a handful of solid state memory vendors making all of the parts.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@DenisKelley said:
I think I saw someone where the replacement drive for one of the HPs was actually an Intel drive. This stuff grinds my gears.
What's wrong with Intel for SSD drives? There are only a handful of solid state memory vendors making all of the parts.
Nothing wrong with them. I have them in all my Workstations. What grinds my gears is that the HP drive is a re-branding of the Intel Enterprise drive at a substantial markup. See here:
