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Since I don't have a background in hardware storages, I've read some articles to learn about the comparison between consumer and enterprise SSDs. I'm confused of what makes enterprise SSDs perform better than consumer SSDs

I learned that a Consumer SSD employs fast large block reads because it focuses on providing fast boot time and app load time. Comparing it to an enterprise SSD, fast small block random reads and writes is used.

My question: What does fast small block random reads and writes do for enterprise SSD? Thank you all in advance for your help!

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  • Chances are, the enterprise SSD has a large amount of cache RAM on the controller - it would cache as much of that as possible.
    – rdtsc
    Feb 10, 2016 at 2:45
  • This is the kind of manufacturer claim that should be treated with extreme skepticism and independent benchmarks. First you need to establish that there is a performance difference between the two that's more than the variance between different manufacturers or models.
    – pjc50
    Feb 10, 2016 at 9:47

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This is probably more suited for Super User, but think about a transactional database workload -- high frequency queries operating against various parts of a given database. It won't have nice block read style access patterns similar to booting an app or watching a movie -- it's a pretty non-deterministic application.

Additionally, it's common in enterprise land to use SSDs as large, fast cache drives, be it for file systems (ZFS ZIL / L2ARC) or an actual caching application (HTTP proxies or similar).

I would say the primary differences come down to the controller and the cache available -- chances are the NAND dies themselves will be somewhat similar between high-end consumer and enterprise, perhaps only differing in binning. The real smarts come from the controller itself.

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  • Enterprise flash also tends to sacrifice usable capacity for better wear leveling.
    – Paul A. Clayton
    Feb 10, 2016 at 14:55

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