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Enterprise spinners versus prosumer SSDs

Zangmonkey

Zangmonkey

Supreme [H]ardness
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Jul 6, 2005
Messages
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Other than price and capacity are there reasons to select enterprise spinners over prosumer SSDs in redundant arrays and virtual environments?
 
They're so different, it's like saying, what's better for transporting goods, flatbed trucks or train cars?
 
panfist said:
They're so different, it's like saying, what's better for transporting goods, flatbed trucks or train cars?
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I'm clearly not an expert in enterprise storage platforms. Can your elaborate a bit on the primary differences?
 
Enterprise - paying a premium for reliability and warranty

SSD - paying a premium for speed

Depends on which you value more. Google stopped using Enterprise drives, they found it was less expensive to have redundant consumer level hardware -- but if you have a situation where that isn't possible, then there is still a market for the enterprise level hardware.
 
Brian_B said:
Enterprise - paying a premium for reliability and warranty

SSD - paying a premium for speed

Depends on which you value more. Google stopped using Enterprise drives, they found it was less expensive to have redundant consumer level hardware -- but if you have a situation where that isn't possible, then there is still a market for the enterprise level hardware.
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I understand the selling points of enterprise drives. From what I've heard prosumer SSDs have higher reliability over life than enterprise spinners.

Firstly, Backblaze reports an equal (actually slightly higher) failure rate of enterprise HDD's versus consumer HDDs. So improved reliability of enterprise HDD's in redundant storage systems is no longer true.
Second, wear leveling on prosumer SSDs has been explored into petabytes.... perpetual saturation of drive IO rates over years, with favorable results.

So I do not believe that there is any reliability justifying the premium.... SSDs appear more reliable.
Warranty is also a poor choice AFAICT since when I RMA a drive I will receive a refurbished one, not a new one (do you trust refurbished drives in your array more than new SSDs?)
Even so, a two year warranty on a consumer SSDs implies the same carrying cost for a company: repurpose the refurbished SSD to a desktop machine and put a new (and better!) SSD into the array.

I'm trying to reconcile why enterprise spinners should be selected over prosumer SSDs based on the data indicating that:
SSDs are more reliable than enterprise HDDs
SSDs are roughly equal in price to enterprise HDDs
SSDs are not as affected by heat/cold/vibration as HDDs
SSDs are far more power efficient than HDDs
SSDs tend to exhibit clear signs of wear preceding replacement needs than HDDs
SSDs are far more performant than HDDs (this rebuild times aill be lower, further reducing risk).
SSDs are getting cheaper at a faster rate than enterprise HDDs therefore replacing SSDs on a faster cadence is actually good.
 
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do you write a lot? SSDs warranty for TBW are a joke. You get like a 1 year warranty if you do any serious amount of writes.

Also enterprise drives have less bit flips...that is a big deal in my eyes and worth considering.
 
It would seem as if you have answered your own question there.

The compelling reasons I can think of for spinners right now are storage density (can get 10+T drives in spinners, SSDs exist that big but only as unique critters), and they still win in price per byte (although not necessarily enterprise grade drives).
 
Enterprise drives are really optimized for multi-user use.

There's no reason to get a spinning enterprise drive instead of an SSD for personal use unless you need capacity.
 
kumquat said:
Enterprise drives are really optimized for multi-user use.

There's no reason to get a spinning enterprise drive instead of an SSD for personal use unless you need capacity.
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Can you elaborate on how SSDs would falter in the multi-user environment compared to enterprise drives? All drives are in storage array serving multiple virtualized environments with many users.
 
Zangmonkey said:
Can you elaborate on how SSDs would falter in the multi-user environment compared to enterprise drives? All drives are in storage array serving multiple virtualized environments with many users.
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I don't think consumer SSDs would falter compared to an enterprise drive. I didn't say that they would. I was pointing out one of the often-overlooked aspects of "enterprise drives" that make them "enterprise drives."
 
Zangmonkey said:
Can you elaborate on how SSDs would falter in the multi-user environment compared to enterprise drives? All drives are in storage array serving multiple virtualized environments with many users.
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That's the exact scenario you would never want to use consumer grade drives be it SSD or spinning HDs for that matter.

You should look at "SSD Steady State Performance" tests/results to get an idea why you should never use them in an enterprise / multi-user environment.


Some consumer drives when put in a multi-user / enterprise environment will actually slow to slower than spinning enterprise HDs because they're not made for that mixed work load or the consistent use.

Consumer SSD tests are also done at 8GB span while enterprise are done at 100% of the disk and while both drop performance once steady-state is reached enterprise performance is magnitudes higher (especially Intel Enterprise SSD).
 
ToddW2 said:
That's the exact scenario you would never want to use consumer grade drives be it SSD or spinning HDs for that matter.

You should look at "SSD Steady State Performance" tests/results to get an idea why you should never use them in an enterprise / multi-user environment.


Some consumer drives when put in a multi-user / enterprise environment will actually slow to slower than spinning enterprise HDs because they're not made for that mixed work load or the consistent use.

Consumer SSD tests are also done at 8GB span while enterprise are done at 100% of the disk and while both drop performance once steady-state is reached enterprise performance is magnitudes higher (especially Intel Enterprise SSD).
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Yeah, that may be. I kinda went back and forth on it in my head when responding the second time. I certainly didn't mean to imply that enterprise HDDs were better than consumer SSDs.

Do you have any links to thorough comparisons of high quality consumer SSDs vs enterprise HDDs in multi-user or multi-mode environments?
 
ToddW2 said:
That's the exact scenario you would never want to use consumer grade drives be it SSD or spinning HDs for that matter.

You should look at "SSD Steady State Performance" tests/results to get an idea why you should never use them in an enterprise / multi-user environment.


Some consumer drives when put in a multi-user / enterprise environment will actually slow to slower than spinning enterprise HDs because they're not made for that mixed work load or the consistent use.

Consumer SSD tests are also done at 8GB span while enterprise are done at 100% of the disk and while both drop performance once steady-state is reached enterprise performance is magnitudes higher (especially Intel Enterprise SSD).
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shush....SSDs can never be slower than a spinner :rolleyes:
 
kumquat said:
Yeah, that may be. I kinda went back and forth on it in my head when responding the second time. I certainly didn't mean to imply that enterprise HDDs were better than consumer SSDs.

Do you have any links to thorough comparisons of high quality consumer SSDs vs enterprise HDDs in multi-user or multi-mode environments?
Click to expand...

No one is interchanging consumer SSD for enterprise HDD in an enterprise environment it's just not happening. It's taking a LOT of revisions and white papers to get enterprises to trust enterprise SSD to replace their spinners.

Depending on your multi-user enviroment (say a home lab) you may be able to get by on over provisioned consumer SSD (sandisk extreme pro, samsung pro lines) but most everyone I know runs Intel Enterprise drives even at home because you can get them for >50% discount when buying them used.

I've got a # of tests lined up to compare consumer ssd to enterprise ssd arrays, I have a # of ent hdds (10k rpm and 15k rpm) I could run some tests on those to consumer too if you like -- but that was never on my mind since SSD vs. SSD makes much more sense as the spinners are more for bulk/archive type storage and don't need to be 15k rpm for just moving data back and forth. The tricky part is that arrays may have cache drives or be tiered so doing an apples/apples is easier to do on a 1 drive vs 1 drive vs entire arrays since not many if any people are risking that much data on huge consumer ssd arrays.
 
Well don't do anything on my account ;)

I'm out of that game now and onto other things, but a couple of years ago I was thinking about getting a handful of high-end consumer SSDs and shoving them into some empty slots on one of our vSphere storage arrays to see how it went with one of our more IO-limited applications vs our aging 146GB 15k drives.
 
kumquat said:
Well don't do anything on my account ;)

I'm out of that game now and onto other things, but a couple of years ago I was thinking about getting a handful of high-end consumer SSDs and shoving them into some empty slots on one of our vSphere storage arrays to see how it went with one of our more IO-limited applications vs our aging 146GB 15k drives.
Click to expand...

If the IO work load is limited and you OP 25% I think you'd be very happy, especially with Sandisk Extreme Pro of Sasmung 850 Pro drive.
 
Enterprises are often buying drives based on capacity and expected life, not blazing fast speeds. Try getting a bean counter to sign off on 2 Petabytes of new SSD storage when spinning drives are a fraction of the cost. The vast majority of enterprise use doesn't need SSD speeds across the entire storage array, so enterprises buy spinners. Also enterprise storage is spread across so many different drives in an array it usually isn't an issue when multiple users are accessing data at the same time.

There are applications for SSDs in enterprises, those are just the exceptions and not the rule.

If you can get the amount of SSD storage you want at a price you find reasonable, buy the SSDs. It feels really foolish to say "other than price and capacity..." when those ARE the reason for enterprise spinners.
 
Ocellaris said:
What are you really going for here? Are you even reading the thread?
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I am reading the thread, and most of what I've read focuses on storage density, reliability and certain multi-user workloads. Bit flipping is surely an issue for archival systems.

It doesn't seem to me that reliability and multi-user workloads championed by spinners and yet I see people here seem to be adverse to prosumer use in the enterprise environment.

I'm trying to understand what obstacles, other than price and density, SSDs still have to overcome for enterprise operations to implement them.
 
That's like asking a vegan "Other than the fact that it comes from an animal and you don't like the taste, what else do you have against meat?"
 
Zangmonkey said:
What about for bare metal web/service servers?
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What about it?

I run some SSD (ENT) and some 15K RPM ENT Spinners in various web servers, so it depends on your needs/usage, but again I would never run consumer/prosumer in a web server unless it was a home lab/test/dev system to just see how things were working or local development.
 
Zangmonkey said:
I am reading the thread, and most of what I've read focuses on storage density, reliability and certain multi-user workloads. Bit flipping is surely an issue for archival systems.

It doesn't seem to me that reliability and multi-user workloads championed by spinners and yet I see people here seem to be adverse to prosumer use in the enterprise environment.

I'm trying to understand what obstacles, other than price and density, SSDs still have to overcome for enterprise operations to implement them.
Click to expand...

SSD are used for enterprise applications. There are enterprise-specific SSDs and they're pretty common.
 
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