There's something I don't understand about the enterprise vs consumer (or "client") SSD classification: According to the widely quoted JEDEC standard, JESD218A, [0] these are the date retention standards:
Retention Use (power off):
* Client: 30° C, 1 year
* Enterprise: 40° C, 3 months
It's not a typo, I've seen it in many places: It appears that the power-off data retention standard is only 3 months in enterprise drives (1 year in client drives isn't great either).
Can anyone explain it? My only guess is that the "enterprise" classification refers to drives designed to churn data 24/7, not store it long-term. But I think many people understand the term 'enterprise' to mean much greater durability. I'd be very disappointed if I experienced dataloss from leaving any drive on a shelf for 3 months, much less an expensive enterprise drive. (Or maybe I misunderstand what's meant by Retention Use (power off)?)
Retention is related to temperature. Consumer drives may last less than 3 months at 40 C, and enterprise drives may last more than 1 year at 30 C. Both may last even longer at 20 C.
How many studies have been done verifying that enterprise SSDs perform significantly better than consumer SSDs in any metrics?
My belief is that the consumer SSDs actually have very similar performance and reliability requirements to the enterprise because they are generally deployed without redundancy, and so any failures can be catastrophic for consumers. And then there are lots of consumers that will go on Amazon or Newegg etc. and leave very bad reviews.
So I personally believe the 'enterprise' distinction is mostly a scam, and developers who are looking for inexpensive hosting have been mainly waiting for A) datacenter providers to realize that or B) a slow market perfusion that mitigates it.
Those are the same retention ability for typical flash. Every 5C of storage temperature cuts data life in half. (A higher write temperature can lessen this, but you wouldn't want to depend on it in a typical server scenario.)
But they don't want to assume all devices will behave that way. Better to specify the server scenario at realistic server temperatures.
I think "enterprise" really means "designed for living in a datacenter", with its accompanying temperature-controlled environment. If you want durability/reliability/ruggedness, "industrial" is the keyword to look for.
A consumer drive will spend its live either powered on or at "room temperature", but an enterprise drive is very likely in a data center inside a server or disk array, and much more likely to experience higher temperatures even when powered down.
The main difference is enterprise drives support time limited error recovery, this is a feature that allows for reliable use in conjunction with a hardware RAID controller.
This is only my personal experience, bu I am embarrassed to report that I have been in DreamHost customer for over 10 years for hosting some small and unimportant personal projects. I have been consistently disappointed with the level of their engineering and systems. Their systems are unreliable, their custom build ticketing system is atrocious. I would take any technical advice from them with a handful of salt.
As a counterpoint (and this is only my personal experience), but I'm happy to report that I've been a DreamHost customer for over 10 years for hosting some small and unimportant personal projects. I've been really happy with everything. Not sure how our usage of their service differs (probably lots!), but I would hate for people to dismiss DreamHost without hearing about a positive experience with them.
I'd take the article with a pinch of salt, they admit they haven't got anywhere near capacity yet, and it doesn't seem like they'd done any real load testing before "final layout". They could easily go the way of most low end VPS providers, day one benchmarks look great and then a few months later when the node fills out and people start using it performances sinks with no lower bound to be seen anywhere.
I've been with them for about the same amount of time. A few domains registered, personal email, a few website projects, a couple cron jobs, and an OwnCloud install ...
Generally they deliver. Not spectacular, but much better than any of the other shared hosts.
The reason why I haven't moved off them completely is because for smaller web projects it's easier to have everything in one place, ready to go and managed, without dealing with deploying and maintaining the stack (which can be overkill for hobby stuff).
All of the other shared hosts went to shit about 5 years ago. Dreamhost may eventually get there as well, but for the time being they are still decent, and get the job done.
> I am embarrassed to report that I have been in DreamHost customer for over 10 years for hosting some small and unimportant personal projects
No need to be embarrassed. I used DH for many many years, starting probably about 13-14 years ago. Since moved to Linode and DO in order to fully control a stack even for small personal things, however fond memories are having a managed environment for a very low price, wildcard emails, bundled domain, and mostly, sticking to their promise which got me to sign-up in the first place: any new pricing plan will be offered to existing customers at the same rate as new customers, which 10-15 years ago was almost unheard of.
Agreed, and they frequently make changes without warning, then send out an email, "sorry if you didn't receive notification this was happening". They make it sound like it's my fault I didn't hear them, when I'm pretty sure they just never said anything to begin with.
Azure has been more reliable, faster, more convenient, and cheaper.
their shared hosting product is very, very different from their DreamCompute offering. completely different everything, aside from the datacenter space.
I recently looked at SSDs for a project I'm working on. By far, the biggest performance impact is in using PCIe rather than SATA interfaces. (The performance boost also may rely on M.2 and/or NVMe; because I don't have a PCIe controller on the system I was working on, I didn't look into it further). An example:
Samsung 850 Pro, reputedly one of the fastest SATA SSD drives (SATA 3, 2.5", AHCI):
The article acknowledges the availability of NVMe, but the price per unit of storage is far higher than for enterprise SATA SSDs. Cost matters, especially when you're buying thousands of units.
I've been with drramhost for at least 10 years, but Im about to move everything because of their recent move from open source webmails to only atamail or whatever the new one is called. I spent a lot of time locking down my squirrelmail install, only to login one day and be greeting by a completely different client. Sure they had warnings, but none of those warnings clearly stated the forced move, I thought I could opt out.
As for the rest of their service, Their actual server performance is decent, but their VPS offerings dont seem competitive these days, so Im strugling to find a reason to stay.
I had their VPS, but they do not give you root access. (In fact removed root access from one I used for a few years, screwing a bunch of my stuff up). Kind of a strange definition of VPS they have now.
[+] [-] hackuser|9 years ago|reply
Retention Use (power off):
* Client: 30° C, 1 year
* Enterprise: 40° C, 3 months
It's not a typo, I've seen it in many places: It appears that the power-off data retention standard is only 3 months in enterprise drives (1 year in client drives isn't great either).
Can anyone explain it? My only guess is that the "enterprise" classification refers to drives designed to churn data 24/7, not store it long-term. But I think many people understand the term 'enterprise' to mean much greater durability. I'd be very disappointed if I experienced dataloss from leaving any drive on a shelf for 3 months, much less an expensive enterprise drive. (Or maybe I misunderstand what's meant by Retention Use (power off)?)
[0] Available here: https://www.jedec.org/standards-documents/results/jesd218b.0... and quoted here in the table here: http://www.kingston.com/us/ssd/enterprise/best_practices/ent...
[+] [-] LeifCarrotson|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ilaksh|9 years ago|reply
My belief is that the consumer SSDs actually have very similar performance and reliability requirements to the enterprise because they are generally deployed without redundancy, and so any failures can be catastrophic for consumers. And then there are lots of consumers that will go on Amazon or Newegg etc. and leave very bad reviews.
So I personally believe the 'enterprise' distinction is mostly a scam, and developers who are looking for inexpensive hosting have been mainly waiting for A) datacenter providers to realize that or B) a slow market perfusion that mitigates it.
[+] [-] Dylan16807|9 years ago|reply
But they don't want to assume all devices will behave that way. Better to specify the server scenario at realistic server temperatures.
[+] [-] userbinator|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jo909|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] digi_owl|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kephael|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justjonathan|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] charliepark|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nowprovision|9 years ago|reply
I'd take the article with a pinch of salt, they admit they haven't got anywhere near capacity yet, and it doesn't seem like they'd done any real load testing before "final layout". They could easily go the way of most low end VPS providers, day one benchmarks look great and then a few months later when the node fills out and people start using it performances sinks with no lower bound to be seen anywhere.
[+] [-] jest3r1|9 years ago|reply
I've been with them for about the same amount of time. A few domains registered, personal email, a few website projects, a couple cron jobs, and an OwnCloud install ...
Generally they deliver. Not spectacular, but much better than any of the other shared hosts.
The reason why I haven't moved off them completely is because for smaller web projects it's easier to have everything in one place, ready to go and managed, without dealing with deploying and maintaining the stack (which can be overkill for hobby stuff).
All of the other shared hosts went to shit about 5 years ago. Dreamhost may eventually get there as well, but for the time being they are still decent, and get the job done.
[+] [-] arkitaip|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zhte415|9 years ago|reply
No need to be embarrassed. I used DH for many many years, starting probably about 13-14 years ago. Since moved to Linode and DO in order to fully control a stack even for small personal things, however fond memories are having a managed environment for a very low price, wildcard emails, bundled domain, and mostly, sticking to their promise which got me to sign-up in the first place: any new pricing plan will be offered to existing customers at the same rate as new customers, which 10-15 years ago was almost unheard of.
[+] [-] moron4hire|9 years ago|reply
Azure has been more reliable, faster, more convenient, and cheaper.
[+] [-] tomschlick|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pyvpx|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hackuser|9 years ago|reply
Samsung 850 Pro, reputedly one of the fastest SATA SSD drives (SATA 3, 2.5", AHCI):
* Sequential read/write: 550/520 MB/s
* 4K random read: 100K IOPS
Samsung 950 Pro (PCIe 3.0 x4, M.2, NVMe):
* Sequential read/write: 2,500/1,500 MB/s
* 4K random read: 300K IOPS
Source: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9702/samsung-950-pro-ssd-revie...
[+] [-] ilaksh|9 years ago|reply
So far out of the whole internet, there was no response, except for one guys saying it was really silly, but he also said that SSDs were really silly.
So as usual it seems I am wasting my breath trying to interact with people.
[+] [-] WestCoastJustin|9 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.apple.com/ca/macbook-pro/specs-retina/
[2] http://www.computerworld.com/article/2900330/apple-mac/holy-...
[+] [-] otterley|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickff|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arca_vorago|9 years ago|reply
As for the rest of their service, Their actual server performance is decent, but their VPS offerings dont seem competitive these days, so Im strugling to find a reason to stay.
[+] [-] rileymat2|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] killbrad|9 years ago|reply