Consumer PCIe Gen4 M.2 vs Enterprise U.2
- Thread starter The Gecko
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I have used both in desktops (A PBlaze5 U.2 Enterprise drive and a NVME 983 drive(?) Samsung) and I could not notice any significant difference in performance.
The biggest plus for Enterprise drives is durability. Enterprise drives are often measured in DWPD (Daily Full Drive writes per day) and Consumer drives just are a magnitude lower amount of write endurance, which they really do not even need. So unless you are running DBs on your drive, or using it as a Cache drive to back a large array, It is a much better value per dollar to stick with a consumer gaming drive for consumer gaming.
The biggest plus for Enterprise drives is durability. Enterprise drives are often measured in DWPD (Daily Full Drive writes per day) and Consumer drives just are a magnitude lower amount of write endurance, which they really do not even need. So unless you are running DBs on your drive, or using it as a Cache drive to back a large array, It is a much better value per dollar to stick with a consumer gaming drive for consumer gaming.
Just go with U.2 enterprise. Everything is better. As explained in several STH articles, PLP is not only power loss protection, it also is speed.
The trick is to find great deals on Enterprise drives. I found 3x Intel DC P3700 800GB drives on ebay for 66 EUR/piece, when 1000GB was about $100.
Intel MAS (now solidigm) reported like 5 power on events, and less than 1% used. Still to this day i'd rather use them than a consumer 2TB drive for $66, given the choice.
But the trick is to wait for the great ebay deal from some big corp dumping HW on ebay. That's why Great Deals is such a great forum thread here.
edit: 12,000 MB/s means nothing in the long run, it's just a marketing ploy, unless you really need that speed sustained for special use cases
The trick is to find great deals on Enterprise drives. I found 3x Intel DC P3700 800GB drives on ebay for 66 EUR/piece, when 1000GB was about $100.
Intel MAS (now solidigm) reported like 5 power on events, and less than 1% used. Still to this day i'd rather use them than a consumer 2TB drive for $66, given the choice.
But the trick is to wait for the great ebay deal from some big corp dumping HW on ebay. That's why Great Deals is such a great forum thread here.
edit: 12,000 MB/s means nothing in the long run, it's just a marketing ploy, unless you really need that speed sustained for special use cases
For desktop use cases, you probably won't notice a difference in consumer M.2 vs enterprise U.2. The advantages of the latter are less thermal throttling and higher endurance. Those are both irrelevant for typical consumer use cases.
However, if you can find a used enterprise drive, you can get a good deal. Even a 1TB 1 DWPD drive (assuming 5y warranty) with 50% lifetime left would have over 900TB write endurance left, which is more than a brand new 1TB 980 pro.
However, if you can find a used enterprise drive, you can get a good deal. Even a 1TB 1 DWPD drive (assuming 5y warranty) with 50% lifetime left would have over 900TB write endurance left, which is more than a brand new 1TB 980 pro.
a M.2 to U.2 adapter costs a few bucks, good quality cable a bit more, but once you have those, you have a U.2 Enterprise drive you can use in many places, like hot swap bays etc.. plus it has it's own thermal dissipation shell, or just attach to a M.2 slot on a cheap consumer mobo.
With a consumer M.2 drive you have no PLP, extremely limited mounting options, and a constant issue with thermal management etc.. A enterprise U.2 drive is just much more versatile, and once it gets old and outdated, you can use that versatility to extend it's usefulness in many ways, that you can't with a M.2 drive that always needs a motherboard M.2 slot.
With a consumer M.2 drive you have no PLP, extremely limited mounting options, and a constant issue with thermal management etc.. A enterprise U.2 drive is just much more versatile, and once it gets old and outdated, you can use that versatility to extend it's usefulness in many ways, that you can't with a M.2 drive that always needs a motherboard M.2 slot.
When you have databases and / or virtual machines, any enterprise class SSD is at least 10x faster, because of PLP which makes sync writes 100-1000x faster. I have no idea why nobody benchmark disk drives properly. It easy to see the difference.
I have some old screenshots of benchmarks I did with fio and pg_test_fsync, and its still relevant today.
I have some old screenshots of benchmarks I did with fio and pg_test_fsync, and its still relevant today.
u.2 enterprise ssds are available in larger capacities -> you can have your entire steam library installed
If web browsing and office tools (office 365, open office etc.) are desktop duties then there will be no difference.
If you consider "developing"/coding a desktop duty then it will depend on what you're doing. (Debugging database releated stuff could perform drastically different with consumer oriented or enterprise/datacenter oriented ssds.)
The potential deciding factor for me is the availability of higher-density u.2 drives. 7.68TB Gen3 u.2 drives are showing up new and lightly used on ebay in the ~$400 range, while 8TB NVME consumer drives are either unavailable or substantially more expensive. Given the choice between an 8TB SATA SSD for $400 and a 7.68 TB u.2 drive for the same or less money that has 1) massively better performance; 2) massively greater durability; and 3) a better warranty, it's hard to go for the SATA drive, even when I'll only occasionally notice the higher performance. Sorry, this is OT, since I'm talking about SATA and not consumer NVME. Enterprise u.2 all the way for me.
Fortunately my ebay-sourced EPYC system (thanks @ebay tugm4470!!) has loads of PCIE. But it also has loads of SATA and now the (admittedly crappy performance) Samsung 870 QVO 8TB is only $320 BNIB. Still not a huge price premium for the amount of additional performance that U.2 gives--I just need to decide if the massively better performance is worth the substantially higher power usage.
Back on topic--as I said above, between consumer gen4 and enterprise gen3 NVME I'd take the slightly lower peak performance of the enterprise stuff in exchange for the durability and consistency of performance.
Addition to your point, when gen4 consumer drive saturates the cache it's slower than enterprise gen3 drive. The speed for enterprise is 100% span(whole disk). But again depends on the use case. If you have constant high load such as hosting multiple VMs then the difference is big.
you can fit 4x m2 per pcie slot with the hyper m2 but i've not seen any adapter that takes more than 2x u2 (trying to fit drives into high density rack servers like c6220)
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3000 per single point of failure isn't really a realistic example though. looking to upgrade a ceph cluster that has 6x1.92tb hgst per c6220 node.
of course willing to consider other high density chassis with u2 bays that is reasonably priced compared to just refitting them with higher capacity hgsts
Just snagged a couple gen3 U.2 drives (Kingston DC1500M) for a too-good-to-miss price and plugged one of them in. They're exactly as advertised--good and bad. More or less rated speeds as long as you want to hammer them. Assuming you keep them cool. Seems they need at least a bit of airflow to keep from thermal throttling. And they definitely don't sip power. Really really nice though.
There are some drives with broken firmware that did not support it well (in the past). Most recent drives are known to fully support P0-P4 states as long as OS kernel supports it. You can check it yourself by querying through smartctl (Linux) - smartctl -a /dev/device and looking into Supported Power States part of the output.
Wow, I've used that on SATA disks in TrueNAS Core but apparently just tried with NVMe drives - there is a lot more power information there, including P0-P4 and the power draw for each (970 EVO Plus in my case). Thanks!