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Comment by lelele | Hacker News Reader

> I usually buy second hand enterprise SSDs off eBay.

How do you find them, please? Do you just query for "enterprise ssd"? I've just run this search and indeed it returns lots of models from different brands. Thank you.

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Look specifically for the feature "power loss protection" (or PLP). This is a bank of capacitors that allows the drive to finish its current write in the event of a power loss. really common feature in enterprise drives.

The sellers usually do not write "enterprise" in the offer. You have to know the model numbers (for example, the SK Hynix Platinum P41 is the same as the Solidigm P44 Pro and the SK Hynix PC801).

Thanks, but how do you know that those are enterprise SSDs? Of the three you've mentioned, only Solidigm P44 Pro's homepage explicitly classifies it as an enterprise SSD.

You could look for SAS or u.2 ssds. Those would be enterprise for sure, but then you need specialty interfaces to use them... Otoh, used enterprise multiport SAS HBAs are also often cheap... many people shop for them to build large sata arrays.

Never again with the SK Hynix drives. They have an issue they've ignored for years and refuse to fix that means the cache eventually fails on them, write speeds plummet, and the drive turns to shit. They recently released a firmware to fix it and it did nothing.

https://forum.level1techs.com/t/all-sk-hynix-p41-ssds-suffer...

You'll find reports from around the web of people flashing updated firmware and getting better performance for a few days or weeks, then it cuts back in half again.

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