[wtallis]

Read speeds are similar between consumer and enterprise SSDs; they use the same flash and there's overlap with high-end consumer SSDs using the same controllers as entry-level and mid-range enterprise SSDs.

The main difference is in write performance: consumer SSDs use SLC caching to provide high burst write performance, while server SSDs usually don't and are optimized instead for consistent, sustainable write performance (for write streams of many GB).

Server SSDs also usually have power loss protection capacitors allowing them to safely buffer writes in RAM even when the host requests writes to be flushed to stable storage; consumer drives have to choose between lying to the host and buffering writes dangerously, or having abysmal write performance if the host is not okay with even a little bit of volatile write caching.