It’s a fact: you get what you pay for. The same goes when buying SSDs. But choosing the right one isn’t as simple as trusting a spec sheet to really know how things will run in your stack. Sure, you could get a bunch of cheap drives from Amazon and make someone happy from a budgetary perspective. But when those drives fail under the stress of long-term 24/7 use, will everyone still be happy when you need to replace all of them?
Choosing the right enterprise-grade SSD means running real-world tests to see how well they’ll perform when rolled out into production. Tests and comparisons stress the drives to determine their failure limits, check their endurance and see if performance will change over time.
This two-part article will dive into the challenges and suggestions for building and running effective enterprise SSD tests; first from the perspective of hardware and getting your testing rig configured, then by examining how to compare benchmarks.