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Comment by fc417fc802

5 hours ago

Seems like it is though? Most consumer usage does not have much churn. For things like the browser cache that do churn the total volume isn't that high.

The comparison here is database and caching workloads in the datacenter that experience high churn at an extremely high sustained volume. Many such workloads exist.

There's a very big difference between a workload where you have to take care to structure your IO to minimize writes so you don't burn out the drive, and a workload that is simply easy enough that you don't have to care about the write endurance because even the crappy drives will last for years.

  • Of course. The inferior but cheaper technology is more cost effective in most cases but for certain workloads that won't be the case despite being more affordable per unit upfront.

    The workloads flash is more cost effective for (ie most of them) either aren't all that write heavy or alternatively leave the drive sitting idle the vast majority of the time. The typical consumer usecase is primarily reads while it mostly sits idle, with the relevant performance metrics largely determined by occasional bursts of activity.

Consumer usage does not have much churn, but the average desktop is probably doing 5-50 drive writes per year. That's far away from a heavy database load, but it's just as far away from WORM.