Data growth continues to accelerate, straining storage infrastructures and putting pressure on organizations to find ways to control storage costs. Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) often try to cut costs by using consumer-grade storage, but that’s a risky strategy. While it will certainly reduce costs in the short term, it creates the very real possibility of higher operating costs and downtime in the future.

Simply put, consumer-grade technology is designed for consumer-grade workloads. For example, consumer-grade hard drives are typically designed to handle an annual workload limit of about 25TB per year, much less than the 500TB annual limit for most enterprise-grade drives. Unsurprisingly, failure rates skyrocket when consumer drives are plugged into arrays and subjected to data center workloads.

Another big difference is the always-on nature of the business environment. Data center storage arrays are on all the time and are rarely idle for any length of time. When they don’t support application requests or save data, they are often involved in error detection, system backup, and other maintenance tasks, all of which put additional stress on mechanical components. Consumer-grade devices just weren’t designed for that kind of constant activity.

In hybrid arrays that combine traditional hard drives with flash-based solid-state drives (SSDs), it has become quite common to use consumer-grade SSDs as a method of cost control. The theory is that since flash drives are electronic without the mechanical limitations of hard drives, they can handle the added workload. However, there are multiple trade-offs.

The life expectancy of a flash drive is measured by the number of write or erase cycles it can take before becoming unstable. Consumer drives designed for light duty use lack the durability of enterprise-class SSDs and can wear out more than 10 times faster. Enterprise SSD also offers significantly faster data transfer speeds with performance of several gigabits per second compared to the 2500 Mbps of top-of-the-line consumer products.

Consumer-grade storage can provide plug-and-play simplicity, but without the scalability, capacity, or optimization features of an enterprise-grade solution. However, many SMBs often feel they have no choice due to the upfront costs of enterprise-grade storage.

iXsystems is removing that barrier with its line of TrueNAS storage appliances designed for smaller organizations that need reliable enterprise-class storage. Based on the open source software-defined storage system FreeNAS, TrueNAS X10 is a unified storage array that offers 20TB of hybrid file and block storage for less than $10,000.

TrueNAS X10 arrays are loaded with enterprise-grade capabilities, including VMware, Citrix, and Veeam certifications, public cloud integration, capacity-efficient features like inline block-level compression, deduplication, and thin provisioning, as well as snapshots, replication and data. -Encryption at rest.

TrueNAS X10 is available in a single controller or dual controller configuration. iXsystems recommends the dual-controller configuration for customers who require high availability, but notes that those with budget constraints can initially opt for the single-controller version and then upgrade to a dual configuration at a later time. Each storage controller is anchored to a high-performance systems-on-a-chip (SOC) Intel Xeon D-1531 processor.

While it’s important to limit costs and save cash where possible, you need reliable technology to drive business efficiency. With data growth accelerating at a breakneck pace, using consumer-grade solutions to address your storage needs is a gamble that could lead to downtime, data loss, and other operational issues.