When creating a quote for a few physical machines recently I was noticing that the "consumer" grade SSD's came in standard sizes like 512GB, 1TB etc while the enterprise grade SSD's came in sizes like 960GB, 1.92TB, 3.84TB etc. I've also noticed the difference in SATA vs SAS spinning disks as well but never understood the difference.
Is this caused by a difference between MLC/SLC or SATA/SAS or just marketing jargon?
Typically enterprise SSDs have more memory set aside for write-wear management, so for instance a 960GB SSD is likely to be a 1024GB disk with an extra 16th (64GB) set aside for this function as enterprise operations tend to write more than consumer/desktop systems.
For HDD's obviously this doesn't matter but historically SAS disks have just started at 4.5/9GB and then just doubled over time, 18GB/36GB/72GB/144GB/(they then jumped to 300GB for some reason, though some 288GB's did exist), 600GB, 1.2TB and so on).
It's not at all caused by MLC or SLC and it's also nothing to do with SATA vs. SAS.
