Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

'Consumer product' is a synonym for 'cheaply built crap sold at premium prices' these days.

Much as how the introduction of SMR allowed for the prices of real hard drives to increase by 25% or more, the development of new data-destroying technologies for consumer SSDs has pushed the effective price for non-garbage SSD storage up to the $0.75-$1 USD per GB level of enterprise SSDs.



That is ridiculously inaccurate. Consumer SSDs that are absolute overkill on performance and endurance are only half the price of the $0.75 per GB you claim as a price floor for good drives. Realistically, there's no reason for a consumer to spend even 20¢/GB, and there are tons of good drives well below that price which will not eat your data and will outlast the useful lifetime of several other components in your machine. There are reputable, well-behaved SATA SSDs at 10¢/GB.


The entire point of this post is that consumer SSDs provide no data loss protection in the event of an unexpected hard reset or power loss. Data security is only available in far more costly enterprise SSDs.


You've missed out on the substance of the discussion too, then.

Expensive enterprise SSDs make crash-proof data protection automatic. Consumer SSDs require the host system's software to explicitly flush the write cache when necessary. This tradeoff works extremely well in practice, and consumer SSDs don't have serious data loss problems for consumer workloads. Enterprise workloads that are much more paranoid about syncing every single transaction cannot safely use consumer SSDs without unacceptable performance loss, but that certainly doesn't mean that consumer SSDs are playing fast and loose with your data safety.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: