Consumer Grade SSDs vs Enterprise Grade SSDs
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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:
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@DenisKelley said:
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:
That's what all warrantied drives have always been.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@DenisKelley said:
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:
That's what all warrantied drives have always been.
Sure (well, IBM did make their own for a while) - but the markup rate on SSD's is ridiculous compared to HDDs.
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Is the markup that much more? Unlike HDs where there is no difference between the types essentially, I think that the markup tends to be a bit more dramatic.
I wonder if we do a comparison what the ratios look like.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Is the markup that much more? Unlike HDs where there is no difference between the types essentially, I think that the markup tends to be a bit more dramatic.
I wonder if we do a comparison what the ratios look like.
Sure there are differences in the types of SSD - SLC, MSC, etc - but if consumer drives are now lasting 20+ GB a day, and that fits within your metric, the costs are outrageous.
The 1 TB drive is like $4500 from Dell/HP where you can get a consumer Samsung EVO 1 TB drive for $360, or the EVO Pro for under $500. -
I think that it is important to not think of the costs as outrageous but the reliability as being far too high. It's not that the cost of a tractor trailer is too much or that they are even expensive when you need to haul lots of stuff. But if you are just making a few trips a year to Home Depot then a used pickup truck is the better value for you. It's not that enterprise SSDs are expensive for what they are, it is that the are likely the wrong tool for the job.
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Really? You think 9x the cost is even warranted for Enterprise mission critical stuff? Perhaps instead of rolling out RAID 5 on SSD with those less reliable drives you roll out RAID 10 and still save 4.5x the cost.
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@Dashrender said:
Really? You think 9x the cost is even warranted for Enterprise mission critical stuff? Perhaps instead of rolling out RAID 5 on SSD with those less reliable drives you roll out RAID 10 and still save 4.5x the cost.
Are you looking at the differences in dollars per write? How much more expensive are they?
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Really? You think 9x the cost is even warranted for Enterprise mission critical stuff? Perhaps instead of rolling out RAID 5 on SSD with those less reliable drives you roll out RAID 10 and still save 4.5x the cost.
Are you looking at the differences in dollars per write? How much more expensive are they?
Yeah OK - you definitely have a point there. Thanks. It would be interesting to see them side by side.
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If you think about what people pay for enterprise hard drives versus consumer and how little you get. WD RE vs. WD Red Pro, for example. Sure you don't pay 10x more, but the only real different is in the URE rate. If you are not using parity RAID, that rate is worthless. So you pay 10% or 20% but get, quite often, nothing at all for it.
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This doesn't help my understanding.
Going back to the pre write idea - It's likely that an enterprise could have huge amounts of writes versus a SMB (but some SMBs have huge writes too), the idea would be to see when the drives fail due to to many rights in a given situation and see if the extra cost of replacing the drives and the manpower to do said replacements, etc and see if the costs are justified.
The idea that HP/Dell/whomever will send you a free replacement drive doesn't sound all that worth while, since you can get the consumer drives with warranties as well, sure there's probably a bit more work (yes that work does have value for the equation).
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@Dashrender said:
This doesn't help my understanding.
Traditionally, paying for enterprise drives might have gotten you literally nothing. So the extra cost was all waste, except for the warranty support. Today you at least, normally, get much higher reliability.
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@Dashrender said:
The idea that HP/Dell/whomever will send you a free replacement drive doesn't sound all that worth while, since you can get the consumer drives with warranties as well, sure there's probably a bit more work (yes that work does have value for the equation).
Not comparable. HP and Dell will replace a drive even before it fully fails based on error rates, will do so with four hour response time and will run it to your shop and do the replacement for you. You are getting IT staff and extreme logistics as part of the warranty.
Standard warranties from the drive vendors mean that you have to wait for the drive to fail, do an RMA, ship the drive back, wait for a replacement and replace it yourself.
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Take this to a datacenter level and it makes even more sense when you need people to send and receive the drives, do the replacement, etc.
