Solid State Drives
Solid State Drives covers flash storage for servers, arrays and PCs: 2.5-inch SATA and SAS SSDs, NVMe U.2 and M.2 drives, and PCIe add-in flash such as HP's IO Accelerator and Workload Accelerator cards. Enterprise SSDs from HPE, Dell, EMC, HGST and NetApp sit next to client drives like Samsung's MZ-77E series for desktops and laptops, plus array-specific SSDs for Nimble and other storage systems. Enterprise and client SSDs differ in endurance rating, power-loss protection and firmware, so settle which kind your system needs before comparing capacity and price.
Solid State Drives: 13,510 products
Buying guide
Choosing an SSD
Endurance class
Enterprise SSDs are sold by drive writes per day (DWPD): read-intensive models sit around 1, mixed-use around 3, and write-intensive at 10 or more. Size to your write load, not just capacity.
Interface
SATA tops out at 6Gb/s, SAS at 12Gb/s with dual-port options for high-availability arrays, and NVMe runs over PCIe for the lowest latency — but only in NVMe-wired bays or slots.
Power-loss protection
Enterprise SSDs carry capacitors that flush in-flight writes if power drops. Databases and RAID volumes depend on it; most client SSDs don't have it.
Array-specific drives
SSDs for Nimble, 3PAR, Unity or NetApp systems are tied to that array's firmware and carriers. Order them by the array's part number, not by the underlying drive model.
Solid State Drives
Frequently asked questions
Can I use an NVMe SSD in a server with SAS/SATA bays?
Not in those bays. NVMe needs PCIe lanes to the drive, so it requires NVMe or tri-mode (U.3) backplanes, an M.2 slot, or a PCIe adapter card. A SAS/SATA backplane can't run an NVMe drive.
What does DWPD mean?
Drive writes per day over the warranty period. A 1.92TB SSD rated at 1 DWPD is designed to absorb about 1.92TB of writes every day for its rated life; a 3 DWPD drive of the same size, about 5.8TB.
Are older PCIe accelerator cards the same as NVMe drives?
No. Cards such as HP's IO Accelerators rely on vendor-specific drivers, so confirm a driver exists for your operating system version first. Modern NVMe add-in cards use the standard NVMe driver built into current systems.
