Most will use it for heavy office work for applications like Adobe Illustrator®, Adobe Photoshop®, 3D rendering, or other types of visual editing. However, most people will not use their workstation as a server. Crucial does not list drives as compatible with servers or workstations. It has a motherboard that is a server board because it uses ECC (Error Checking and Correction) memory. This could cause serious data corruption. This link goes to a Micron document which goes into great detail about these data protection differences.Ī workstation in most cases is considered a server. With a traditional drive, if the system were to lose power during a write sequence, any of this data on this buffer would be lost. Data in motion is data that is in the process of being transferred, or on the drive buffer. An enterprise drive will typically have more advanced protection for data on the drive and extended wear life.Īt a basic level, a consumer grade drive will protect only data at rest, while an enterprise drive is going to cover data in motion as well. This sort of wear is not covered under warranty. A server that is filling a drive several times over every day, could theoretically use up the entire life of a consumer drive in less than a year. For most users, endurance is something they shouldn’t worry about it would take a typical person many years to use up all of the 72 TB write life on a standard drive. Enterprise drives are rated for significantly more endurance life. Different drives will have different endurance ratings: our BX200 drives are rated at 72 Terabytes (TB) of erase life, an MX200 1000GB drive will be rated 360 TB, and a Micron 800GB M500DC is 2500 TB. This can also be said about the number of erases that an enterprise drive can handle compared to a consumer drive.Īll flash devices, including SSDs, have a limit to the amount of data that can be written to the memory before reliability of that data will be lost, and the memory starts to go into read-only mode.
Unlike a consumer drive, which will lose performance drastically when subjected to continuous writes, an enterprise drive will have a steady level of performance over the given period. Enterprise drives like the Micron® M500DC or S600DC, for example, are designed to handle continuous operation, with high amounts of erases and writes. In an enterprise environment like a server, a drive will be subjected to 24/7 operation, often with a combination of high writes and erases.
Consumer grade drives are designed for standard day to day use, like you would find in a desktop or laptop, other smaller mobile computing devices, and high-performance gaming/work systems. Installing SSDs into a server environment may be bad for an SSD, but not all SSDs are created equal.