Enteprise vs Consumer (SSD)

After 5 years of consumer SSD usage, I purchased a used SSD enterprise class. The consumer grade was Intel 535 480G and the enterprise grade Intel DC S3500. The differences are huge. The bottom line is that enterprise class devices seems not only more reliable but also with less bugs (or none) and 10 times faster in real life usage (!).

Bugs

After some usage I experienced this serious write amplification bug. Thankfully intel had great (but slow) support. (another horror story is my IDE Transcend 32G SSD disk with bug that renders the SSD almost unusable. Very slow with PIO mode (700kB/s) instead of DMA).

Another serious bug, is the "power on hours" report in S.M.A.R.T is wrong. 10.000 hours vs 40.000 hours.

Reliability

I decided to try the DC S3500 enteprise grade device, because I saw 16 reallocated Sectors and the "Media Wear Out Indicator" was in 96. In contrast the "Reallocated Sectors" on S3500 was zero and "Media Wear Out Indicator" was 99.

Speed

To my suprise the biggest difference was in random speed. I issued the command

time find /docs/src/linux-4.20.7/ -name i915\*

The results are that S3500 seems 10 times faster on random reads!

Intel 535       : 2.250s - (telinit 1) - forgot to test Sequential speed
S3500           : 0.270s - (live)      - 135MB/s 1.5Gb Host
Sandisk Extreme : 2.718s - (live)      - 260MB/s 3Gb   Host

I also had a Sandisk SSD to test.

To better understand the difference, we must make attention to a detail on specifications: "100% span". On consumer SSD (535) they state more IOPS on write (33.000) but in range of 8Gb. In reality this is fine for a costumer and a non-bloated OS. But the enterprise S3500 states 23.000 IOPS but on 100% span!

Sep 2025: syntax errors corrected.

Made in Linux :)

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