What is different from SSDs in different applications?

Overview
Flash drives or Solid State Drives (SSDs) are available for a variety of interfaces, including (e)SATA, (e)USB, eMMC, CF cards, SD/micro SD cards, and PCIe drives. There is talk in the industry of making flash drives that can also be used in DIMM slots. For the purposes of this discussion, we will use SSD to refer to flash drives that use either of those interfaces.

Consumer SSD
SSDs come in three general flavors: consumer, business, and industrial, with each prioritizing different features. Consumer SSDs, found in mobile phones, tablets, and laptops, focus primarily on cost, followed by performance, and finally quality. Since smartphones typically retail for about $125, the cost of storage needs to be kept low to allow for a competitive amount of flash storage and meet BOM cost limits. For consumer applications (be it a cell phone or laptop), if the flash misbehaves, a reboot or firmware update can sometimes fix the problem. If data is lost, a customer may be irritated, but the consequences are not likely to have a high business impact.

Enterprise SSD
Enterprise SSDs used in data centers are concerned with performance first, then quality, and then cost. Servers using enterprise SSDs exist in controlled environments, with a UPS to manage unexpected power loss and a backup system that keeps data mirrored for recovery from unexpected failures. Enterprise workloads are often dominated by database queries, so performance, measured in transactions per second, is the key factor in selecting SSD storage. If failures occur with enterprise SSDs, there is usually the ability to quickly switch to a backup drive with minimal downtime or data loss.

industrial SSDs
Industrial SSDs, or rugged SSDs, are used in applications that have a high cost of failure and operate in harsh, often uncontrolled environments. Examples of these devices include a programmable logic controller (PLC) that drives operations in a nuclear power plant or high-speed factory assembly line; a flight data recorder on an aircraft; or a pipeline monitoring system in an oil field. Therefore, the main focus of industrial SSDs is on quality to ensure device longevity despite operation in harsh environments. While there is broad agreement on the relative priority of requirements for industrial SSDs: 1) quality, 2) performance, 3) cost, there is no consistent definition for specifications. Switch from provider to provider. Some believe that the only flash that is reliable enough for industrial use is single level cell (SLC) flash. Others claim that its multi-level cell (MLC) flash can deliver industrial-grade reliability. Some industrial flash vendors show that the operating temperature range is the only differentiator between consumer grade and industrial grade. Other industrial SSD manufacturers have a very wide range of features beyond the extended temperature range.

Cost is the most obvious differentiator between consumer SSDs and industrial SSDs. On the DRAM Exchange (www.dramexchange), the average retail price for a 256GB SSD is $173, or 68 cents/GB. For comparison, at Digikey (www.digikey.com) a 64 GB Virtium SSD costs $460 or $7.18/GB. While not all industrial SSDs have such a large cost difference compared to consumer SSDs, the price is noticeably higher for SSDs with specifications that include long lifespan, wider temperature range, and other industrial requirements. . So how do higher prices explain the differences?