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What's the difference between an enterprise-class SSD and a regular SSD? Is it performance or reliability? Is an enterprise-class HDD even more performant and reliable than a regular SSD? I thought SSDs are more reliable because they don't crash and have better access time than HDD because they don't need to seek.



The difference is between MLC (unreliable) and SLC (reliable) SSDs.

MLC (Multi-Level Cell) SSDs are slightly slower, a lot cheaper, and less reliable than SLC (Single Level Cell) SSDs.

Fundamentally, an MLC stores more data in each cell (hence the Multi), while an SLC stores 1 bit of data in each cell.

There's now all sorts of "eMLC" drives which are pushing the reliability of MLC up towards the SLC levels, but they're not very common yet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-level_cell


Enterprise SSDs are supposed to have better reliability and endurance than consumer SSDs (and some of them actually do). Performance is kind of a toss-up.


Sure, but what about consumer SSD vs enterprise HDD?


It's no contest; SSDs beat HDDs.




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