Dell Solid State Drives

Dell solid state drives state their endurance directly on the listing as DWPD - drive writes per day. That figure, not the capacity, is what tells you whether a drive suits your workload.

Reading the DWPD rating

A 1 DWPD drive is warranted to absorb its full capacity in writes once per day for the warranty term. A 3 DWPD drive absorbs three times that. Dell pairs the number with a workload label:

• Read Intensive - typically 1 DWPD, for content, streaming and mostly-read databases
• Mixed Use - typically 3 DWPD, for virtualisation and general transactional work

Choosing on capacity alone is how a drive ends up consuming its endurance budget years early.

Interfaces in stock

• SATA 6Gb/s - the broadest selection, 2.5-inch
• SAS 12Gb/s and 24Gb/s - dual-ported, including the newer 24G parts
• NVMe over PCI Express, including PCIe 4.0 - the highest throughput tier

Terms you will see on Dell listings

• Hot-plug - supplied in a carrier for a hot-swap bay, often noted as shipping with tray
• ISE - Instant Secure Erase, a controller-level cryptographic erase
• 512e - 4K physical sectors presented to the host as 512-byte sectors
• 14G, 15G - the PowerEdge generation the drive was qualified against

Generation matters for the carrier as much as the electronics: PowerEdge tray designs changed between generations. NVMe also needs a backplane wired for PCI Express, which not every PowerEdge has.

Send us the PowerEdge model and your write profile and we will match capacity, DWPD class and tray together.