Thanks, I see it's a little more nuanced than I originally assumed.
Hmm, maybe I don't get it? Why?
So in the end, I'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish.
Just to give a little more color to where I'm coming from: originally I was curious about enterprise vs consumer strictly for
home use (see
this thread). In my case I know my writes are minimal. And am I willing to pay the enterprise premium for the other benefits? In my mind, since I am certain I don't need the write performance, the other benefits are like insurance. Everybody has a choice for how much insurance they want to buy, right? Do you have disability insurance, life insurance, home owner's insurance (not required if you don't have a mortgage), what level of auto insurance, etc. Except for legal requirements, there's not a right or wrong, and everybody makes their own cost vs risk analysis.
So while I started out thinking about this in terms of my home situation, it also applies to what we're doing at work. We have a home directory server for about 40 employees using good old 7200 rpm spinners in a software raid config. It works and is stable, but the speed is lacking. If it's being lightly used, it's not bad, but if (for example) someone kicks off a big compile, then everyone suffers.
Now... at work we also have a few 24-disk
consumer (Samsung 850 Pro) SSD arrays,
see here. Credit to
@dba for the
Dirt Cheap Data Warehouse inspiration. The "catch" though, is that these arrays are literally 99.999% reads. It's effectively a WORM workload. We add a tiny amount of incremental data every day, and the rest of the time it's just constant reading. Using this allowed the company to save a ton of money by avoiding going with a big iron storage vendor. Even now, we max out the dual 40gb network interfaces (with jumbo frames!) before the drives run out of steam.
I made the thought mistake that, since the read performance is so wonderful with these drives, how bad could the write performance really be? Seeing the graphs above, and the related discussions, I see the answer is: pretty bad!
So, coming back to the home directory server. While we recognize the current server is slow, the higher-ups are very "financially conservative" (I'm being generous here)... So before I understood the huge consumer vs enterprise write performance discrepancy, I was thinking: we get a 2U chassis with 24 2.5 hotswap bays. Fill it with eight 1tb consumer SSDs. Raid-6 them together for nearly 6tb of storage, and 16-bays left for future requirement increases. I haven't revisited the numbers in a while, but last I checked, the base server would be about $4k and the drives another $4k, so $8k all-in. Now the higher-ups are anchored to that number. I haven't done any cost estimation for enterprise drives yet, but I'm sure the cost is going to be much higher.
Also, to give a little insight to the "ignoring non-performance impacting benefits of enterprise SSDs" mindset: the insurance analogy I used above is apt, because one of the company owners in fact does not have insurance on his house. He can afford to "self insure". Paradoxically, the cost of home owner's insurance is therefore trivial to him, but he believes the chance of a disaster so low that he's willing to make the trade off. So hopefully that gives you a little insight into the thought-process under which I'm working. I've worked here for over a decade; I can say with very high confidence, excepting for performance issues, the owner is definitely willing to trade all the other risks to save some money. The performance issue could be a deal-breaker, but if I can close the performance gap (even partially) with over-provisioning, then that's almost certainly what I'd be instructed to do.
