To always offer you the best quality and the highest availability, at Clouding we only use solid-state drives (SSDs and NVMes) of enterprise or datacenter category.
Datacenter range solid state drives differ in several aspects from normal consumer drives that you can find on your desktop or laptop computer.
Constant Performance
This is one of the main differences with respect to a consumer range disk.
The consumer range discs are designed to offer a lot of writing performance for a short time. This is normal, since on a laptop or desktop computer we don't write continuously, but make short writes on disk instead.
If we try to write at maximum speed continuously on a consumer range disk, at some point the performance will degrade and will be reduced until we let the disk rest for a while, so that it can be internally reorganized.
There may also be performance differences depending on how full or empty the disk is.
In contrast, a datacenter range disk always offers the same performance, throughout its lifetime. It makes no difference whether you are writing data at maximum speed continuously or if it is almost full.
Data loss protection
Another of the main differences between a disk of consumption range and one of datacenter range, is whether or not it has capacitors (condensers) capable of providing the disk with enough power, to be able to finish writing the data that is still in cache in case of an electrical cut.
Although it in't common, if a power outage happens, a consumer-wide disk may suffer data corruption, depending on what data you were writing at the time of the power outage.
Datacenter range discs are prepared for this type of event. In this way, even if an electrical outage occurs - an extremely rare circumstance on a platform like Clouding - the data stored on it will not experience any incident.
Total writes supported
The life of a solid state drive is measured in the number of times a disk can be written. Once the maximum writing is reached, it is not recommended to continue using the disc, since the data read may vary from those written on it.
The consumer range discs, not being designed for constant intensive writing environments, do not support being written as many times as a datacenter range disk.
Datacenter range discs are designed for this type of environment, where the disk receives a constant writing and can be written many times more than a consumer disk.
As well as all this, in addition to using datacenter range discs, we also continuously monitor how many times the disc has been written -wear level- so in the event it becomes necessary, the disk can be replaced before it has been written too many times (normally we replace a disk before it has consumed 80% of the supported writes, to always have a margin of safety).