Consumer SSD

[frankive]

I know one of the biggest "problem" with consumer ssd is that it cant be overwritten so much as enterprise ssd which is build to host sql for 24/7 etc.
But for small, light datacentre (with just a couple of hosts) and 5-10 TB data,
would a consumer ssd (or a logical pool of these) be a good 1st base for the backup files before they are copied with backup copy jobs to cheaper and larger SATA-drives?
In that case we can also benefits of SSD speed in the SureBackup which would increase the speed a lot.
Anyone seeing any issue with this as long as the recent restore points is also copied through the backup copy job daily?

[Gostev]

Some consumer SSDs are specifically built for durability, for example Kingston SSDNow KC100 is sold with 5 years manufacturer warranty, and does not cost a fortune to buy. This one is actually pretty old by now, this is just to demonstrate that such consumer drives do exist.

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KC100 comes with Data Integrity Protection featuring DuraClass™ and DuraWrite™ technology to optimize endurance, performance, data retention and power consumption, plus advanced wear leveling and monitoring, with Flash recycling and garbage collection to maximize consistent performance over the life of the drive.
KC100 offers Enterprise SMART attributes to monitor drive performance and RAISE™ to detect and correct nearly 1 quadrillion times more errors than other SSDs. It’s self-encrypting, so your data is protected without draining host system resources. 
For added peace of mind, KC100 is backed by a five-year warranty and legendary Kingston® reliability.

[dellock6]

Sorry to correct Anton, but those "X years guarantee" are subject to some fine print based on the "average" writes per day, and consumer SSDs are guaranteed indeed for many years but if used as a consumer device and not "written too much".
The best way to plan for SSD usage is to evaluate the daily change rate of all the backups hitting the storage, and see if this value is lower than the daily writes allowed by the SSD. I know sometimes this value is hard to find on consumer SSDs, but if you can look for "TBW" (TiB Written), divide this value per the size of the daily change and this is the number of days the SSD will last on average.

Also, for performances, remember one of the other HUGE differences between consumer and business SSDs is the quality of the firmware and the controller, and the way they manage garbage collection: on consumer devices this can affect greatly the final performances once the disk begins to be full.

Finally, remember all reads come for free on SSDs, compared to spinning disks where also reads ruin the disk on the long run... You only need to count writes on SSDs.

[frankive]

Thanks for the great reply for both of you!

[Gostev]

Luca, yes - we've discussed this in the same internal forum thread where I copied my previous response from but the whole discussion was too long to copy. Anyhow, this particular KC100 model above had almost 5 times write capacity than some generic IBM OEM SSD drive noted. It also seems that generally, based on TBW and prices of a long list of many Kingston SSD models someone else has posted there, Kingston is very focused on this metric, but doesn't charge a significant premium for this added reliability. So, I've been universally recommending Kingston SSDs since then. Maybe there are even better alternatives these days though. My main point was that they do exist

[dellock6]

Indeed, my main point instead was simply to forget the label "consumer" or "enterprise" and simply look at endurance specs

[Gostev]

Agree! However, this naming is also very useful, as it helps to immediately filter out expensive (aka "enterprise") models from consideration