Hey, remember me ?
I posted about some entreprise SSDs here before, and now I made a full blog post about their insides! With even more pictures!
I hope you enjoy it :)
Interesting that the one has such large capacitors in it. I imagine that is as last-ditch effort to keep the board powered long enough to finish flushing all of its caches in the event of a power failure.
That’s exactly the point of power loss protection (aka PLP.) As a side effect of not needing to wait for a flush after a write synchronous write workloads are dramatically faster on enterprise drives with PLP.
Edit: To add a bit of detail - you don’t need to wait for a flush after a synchronous write with PLP because the drive firmware can lie and immediately return from a flush call because there’s enough backup power to complete that flush if the power were cut.
