Are pSLC drives worth it?

[s0emand]

Hi guys, hope it is okay I ask a work related question. 

I work for a company where we use IPC's for datalogging. They are manufactured by a reputable brand in the PLC's world and we use 2x m.2 drives in raid to store the data. 

We're looking to upgrade the capacity, but the manufacturer is insisting on us using their pSLC drives, because of longevity, which cost $1,500 for a 1TB drive. 

I'm kinda getting the feeling that they're trying to sell us snake oil or at least a product we don't need. The data we store is not mission critical, but a drive failure cost us about $10-15,000. 

We buy about 50 systems a year, so it does end up costing us quite a bit of money, which I would rather not spend if we don't need to.

At the most we write 15TB to the drives during their lifetime. Is it really worth paying 7x as much per drive for them to be pSLC?

[Electronics Wizardy]

Is this raid 1 so either drive can fail?

 

With that amount of writes, I don't see a reason to use a slc drives, and would just get a generic drive, esp since there in a raid array anyways, so a failure can easily be fixed.

 

 

[s0emand]

5 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Is this raid 1 so either drive can fail?

 

With that amount of writes, I don't see a reason to use a slc drives, and would just get a generic drive, esp since there in a raid array anyways, so a failure can easily be fixed.

 

 

Yes exactly, but they're deployed in remote locations, so replacement cost about $10-15,000 regardless of hardware and it could take up to 3 months before we're able to get there. Loss of operation is also costly, but hard to put a number on. 

 

The question is really, with the amount of data we're writing, will we have more failures with a MLC drive? 

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, s0emand said:

Yes exactly, but they're deployed in remote locations, so replacement cost about $10-15,000 regardless of hardware and it could take up to 3 months before we're able to get there. Loss of operation is also costly, but hard to put a number on. 

 

The question is really, with the amount of data we're writing, will we have more failures with a MLC drive? 

These are in raid 1 right? So you would need 2 failures to cause any downtime? 

 

From my use of TLC ssds(Id go tlc, mlc ssds are basically dead now) the failure rates are pretty low(sub 1% per year). You will probably save money getting the tlc drives and dealing with one more failure(or the same amount) than spending 1500 a drive extra.

 

But Its hard to know without more data, I'm just gessing from my experience with ssd, and those super low write numbers. Id personally get something like a 970 evo here if it was my money, esp since its already a raid 1.