Quote Originally Posted by bulanula View Post
Confirms that this testing is not what would be deemed "enterprise usage". If this value would have been closer to 30TB then the drive would surely be dead by now. Really interested to see testing using the new fully 4K random methods !
Enterprise applications are build to sustain the load while are kept on fast RAID HDD arrays which can barely provide 10-20MiB/s of random read/write. Now, usually when HDDs are replaced with SSDs, the next bottleneck becomes the CPU as data is fed very fast. Also most enterprise applications are optimized for reading/writing big chunks of data of at least 0.5-1MB (on a hdd, due to it's rotational latency, it takes around the same time to read/write sequential chunks with size between 4KiB and 1MiB). Making enterprise applications that are totally dependent on 4K random read/write is purely retarded. And as an example, Google is using a file system for their clusters which is optimized for files with an average size of 10-60MiB. Their operations are sequential in nature, as this is the best way to use the hardware. Even database engines are highly optimized as MySQL can use 64KiB chunks for read/writes.
Now, the worst possible scenario is indeed using a SSD as a cache, but also, keep in mind that the usage model for a cache is random writes + random reads where depending on the scenario, you might have a higher number of reads than writes which will decrease the average writing speed significantly to allow a recovery period for NAND cells. If real enterprise usage test usage is desired, then the SSDs should be tested in such a way that each page that was written should be also read at least once. Pure random writes on the entire space would be torture, not real life usage.