Many customers ask us if enterprise class SSDs are more reliable than consumer ones. In a nutshell, yes enterprise SSDs are more robust. However, enterprise class still disks such as the Samsung PM963, PM853T, SM843 and SM863 still fail and need data recovery.
However, there are a number of reasons why enterprise-level SSDs are more reliable than consumer-level disks.
- Most enterprise SSDs tend to use controllers which employ smarter ECC engines. For example, some enterprise SSDs come with 24-Bit ECC along with CRC. This is very useful for minimising data corruption.
- Most enterprise SSDs employ over-provisioning, which means the inclusion of extra or “spare” blocks to increase endurance.
- Most enterprise SSDs often use an SDRAM cache for a more efficient handling of metadata.
There is another class of SSD which most people forget about and that’s industrial-class SSDs. These tend to be even more robust than enterprise-class models. For example, in the event of a sudden power loss, some industrial-class SSDs use special capacitors which provide enough energy for the SSD controller to finish any operations that are currently being processed. Some industrial SSD manufacturers, like Innodisk, take power loss protection even further by using a “low-power detector” in their disks, which triggers a recovery algorithm (iData) that assists the drive in shutting down gracefully while also preventing data loss and ensuring data integrity. In the event of corrupt data getting written to the disk, table-re mapping is deployed to delete it. Moreover, most industrial-class SSDs have much more resilience to temperature extremes, which is very useful if you are deploying an SSD in a cold store or smelting plant…
Drive Rescue are based in Dublin Ireland. We offer a full SSD recovery service for disks such as the Samsung PM963, Intel S3510, S3520 and San Disk X100, X400 and X600.