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Comment by pupdogg | Hacker News Reader

Would Samsung 970 EVO Plus NVMe drive be considered consumer grade or enterprise? Also, are NVMe drives susceptible to faster degradation due to higher throughput?

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> Would Samsung 970 EVO Plus NVMe drive be considered consumer grade or enterprise?

This is a consumer SSD, by Samsung's own classification: https://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/ssd/product/c.... The 970 Pro goes into prosumer territory. The DCT range are their enterprise drives: https://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/ssd/product/d...

> Also, are NVMe drives susceptible to faster degradation due to higher throughput

Only if you use the time saved to write more data than you would have with a slower drive. e.g. for 1TB both the 970 evo (nvme) and 870 evo (sata) are covered by warranty for 600 TBW.

The 883 DCT on the other hand offers 0.8 DWPD for 5 years or drive writes per day. So 5 * 365 * 0.8 = 1460TBW, or about 2.45x the consumer drive

>Only if you use the time saved to write more data than you would have with a slower drive

Well, NVMe SSDs do get quite hot due to much higher data transfer speeds, and higher temperatures lead to faster flash memory degradation, although I have no idea how important it is in practice (probably on the order of an SSD dying in 10 years instead of 20)

Consumer NVMe SSDs only get to those higher temperatures if you're writing a lot more data than a SATA SSD or hard drive could handle. And such higher temperatures might at a stretch have a meaningful impact on the data retention time for data currently stored in the SSD, but won't meaningfully shorten the program/erase cycle count.

Flash has (much) worse data retention at higher temperatures, but endurance actually increases with temperature. So the optimal way to handle flash memory is mildly hot when written to (to increase endurance), but stored cold (to increase retention).

Watch out for the fastest Samsung and WD drives. You want to find TB written (TBW) rating for the drive, which is in the specs but takes a little digging usually to find.

Consumer models will often have about 300-600 TBW of life. Data Center hardware designed for continuous use will have 1000-3000 and up.

Watch out for the FASTEST drives like Evo and WD Black, faster drives (PCIe 4.0, 7GB/sec read) can have much lower endurance.

Evos are consumer.

Nvme drives degrade at the same rate as measured in data written. It's a protocol difference, not a difference in the flash quality or construction.

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