that's like complaining a bentley is too expensive and not good at moving your piano.

when you get fined $1mil/min by the SEC for downtime, and data loss or corruption can cost you in the hundreds of millions, or someone dying at a hospital, enterprise gear is cheap. reliability is the key and for what you are paying. now yes, there may be a specific consumer drive more reliable than a specific enterprise drive. so which do you buy? well the enterprise array vendor tested the crap out of everything in every combination and workload and environment, and picked one for you, and it comes with full support and SLAs that you can use to meet gov regulations.

performance for an enterprise drive is not something you usually consider, at all. in fact, did you know that when I quote a storage array, I can't even specify the drive type of vendor, and who knows what will get shipped? Ionly specify drive size.

your performance comes from all your workloads clumped together, spread over a thousand of these drives connected with infiniband, with dedupe and compression on the backend, and hundreds of terabytes of RAM. the perf of an individual drive is not relevant.

but yes, sticking it into an AMD server you bought on newegg when they had a sale is not its purpose, and is a very bad deal.

now when we talk about wise sysadmins, we're talking about guys who know their stuff, and do "important big stuff." not a guy at a small business ordering from newegg. and that guy - he shouldn't be coming up with any storage policies because he lacks the needed large-scale experience.

I sold a 1PB usable-effective (after 3x dedupe/compression) space storage array last year. It was $2mil, after a 65% discount. If one time in its 5year lifecycle the "enterprisey" stuff on that array prevents about 10 seconds of downtime, it paid for itself.

Sure, and judging by System Z sales there's still a demand for earthquake-resistant machines with hot-swappable CPUs.

But for most of us, infrequent downtime is acceptable, and most single-machine are either automatically mitigated or have very limited impact. In that scenario, getting a prosumer SSD and over-provisioning it can be a sensible choice.

* Hetzner joined the chat

There are many other ways to get reliability at the software level, usually via redundancy. Even enterprise level SSDs doesn't guarantee you free of data losses and downtimes, you have to back them up regularly and preferably set up high availability for the database.

cool. so I have a few thousand VMs of various OSs and hypervisors, a few hundred home-built applications with an average of 10 components each, some mainframe, some ibm-i, a bunch of linux, solaris, aix, and HP-UX server, and I'm using mysql, sql server, postgres, oracle, and a couple of DB2. there may be an informix DB or two somewhere - I don't know, I manage storage. about ten different volume managers, about 30 different filesystems - and some raw disks of course. 10PB total space, it needs to be metro cluster replicated ten miles away for active/active, and async in a different state can be about a minute behind max.

So, write me some software that's going to make all that work and make the storage highly available. make sure it works for everything.

you're exposed to solutions that make that work, daily. when you swipe your credit card buying condoms - you have no idea how much happens so your transaction doesn't get lost, corrupted, or errored out.

> you have no idea how much happens so your transaction doesn't get lost, corrupted, or errored out.

Maybe he doesn't, maybe he does - you don't know nor do I.

I'm pretty sure this is how IBM salesmen used to respond when confronted with those newfangled Unix systems which were starting to appear here and there, nibbling first, then taking larger bytes out of their market share. Instead of the litany of diverse systems they'd have thrown LPARs, SYSPlexs and ESMs around but in the end it still came down to the same thing: this stuff is too complicated to be left to amateurs. They were right, in a way... until those amateurs grew their wisdom teeth and took a large part of their market away from them.

Yes, "enterprise" stuff is complicated - often overly so [1] - and it has its place. This does not make it the only viable solution to these problems, something will eventually come up to eat your lunch just like IBM saw its herd of dinosaurs being overtaken by those upstart critters from the undergrowth. Maybe some smart software system which "guarantees" data reliability and availability without the need for "enterprise" storage devices? It wouldn't be the first time after all.

[1] https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...

It depends on what kind of performance you're looking for and how you value that performance.

Under sustained long duration (ie: hours to days) of continuous full load performing small block writes, even the highest rated consumer SSD drives will begin to show significantly reduced throughput in comparison to pretty much any enterprise SSD drives.

Additionally, it's totally normal to see >=5 drive writes per day and 5 year warranties on enterprise drives. Consumer drives usually are rated significantly below 1 drive write per day and rarely for more than 3 years of warranty. If you're performing a lot of writes, you're going to need to replace worn out SSDs and that's not free in a business (remote hands, downtime, etc). So buying less durable storage has costs which don't show up on the original purchase invoice but do need to be factored in within a business setting. The warranty period is the best indication of how confident the drive vendor is about drive durability.

More total space for the same price changes that equation.

Spending 2+X per GB means rather than 5x the same X it’s 5 times 1/2 or less total space. And that’s before you consider write amplification issues with having less total SSD space.

Enterprise SSD’s have a few niche benefits, but they shouldn’t be your default choice for all servers.

I always complained to our IT group about storage - until they showed me an invoice for the drives they are buying.

wait till you see your Cisco bill

> Consumer drives ... and rarely for more than 3 years of warranty.

Looking at my list of consumer SSDs and their warranties:

Samsung EVO 850: 2y

Samsung EVO 960: 3y

Samsung EVO 860: 5y

Samsung EVO 970: 5y

Samsung PRO 970: 5y

For comparison with spinning rust HDDs:

Seagate Ironwolf: 3y

WD Red (both EFAX & EFRX): 3y

But take a wider sample of consumer SSDs, a large majority are <=3 years. And look at enterprise SSDs.

Seagate Ironwolf and WD Red are not enterprise spinny hard disk drives, instead look at Seagate X18 or WD HC560.

Yes, I know, I was comparing warranty on consumer SSDs and consumer HDDs.

Consumer drives usually exclude wear out in their warranties making the number of years pretty much irrelevant. What is does show is that vendors are more confidence in their FTLs and hardware nowadays compared to the first high volume SSDs on the market more than a decade ago.