and not to mention the added power draw for cooling the 15k drives. i now see your point. can probably use multiple ssd in the microserver by using those 6 x 2.5 drive racks that go into the 5.25inch bay.
so when it comes to nand wear using a ssd for say a torrent downloading drive whats the best way to go about finding a drive that can last and wont cost a fortune?
Yep, that's how 4 cheap SAS drives cost you near enough £300 over 3 years without you even noticing, it's the same with older server hardware and you aren't the first and certainly won't be the last not to consider TCO when making a purchase. It can work out OK if you for example use a COLO facility that includes power/cooling, then old hardware can be a genuine bargain, or if you have solar power (or really hate the person who pays the bill), other than that it's a hidden cost.
Torrenting isn't actually that bad in terms of IO unless you are doing a lot of concurrent stuff, the issue tends to be the desire to meet seeding time requirements on private trackers requires space. News is heavier due to the RAR/PAR side of things, especially if you have a fast connection, but it's going to give you full line speed 24/7 if that's what you need. The issue with either is sooner or later you end up running out of things to download other than current/ongoing stuff. That may take a while, but with a fast connection it will happen quite quickly.
To answer your question, SLC and MLC tend to have better write endurance on paper over TLC and QLC, but it's really not that simple. For example I have a 500GB 970 Evo, it's TLC rated to 0.3 DWPD, call that 150GB every single day for 5 years, that's 54.75 TB/yr. Now compare that to QLC with 'only' 0.1DWPD, this time 2TB, that's 200GB/day or 73TB/yr, so allowing for drive size, QLC can actually be a better buy than TLC depending on the drive size and usage pattern. Also to throw a curve ball into things, I have an 1TB MLC Intel 730 series, being MLC you would expect greater durability, the 240GB version is rated at 50GB/day, the 480GB is 70GB/day (yea... twice the capacity and not twice the endurance), so at best my 960GB is 140GB/day which isn't even up to TLC levels. That said the price point of TLC is currently not far off QLC and if you can get something with .3 DWPD vs. .1 DWPD in the same capacity for minimal extra money, it makes more sense on a box that will take a hammering. I can download about something stupid like 2TB/day at home (210Mbit ish). If you're looking for heavy IO and endurance, I quite like the fusion.io drives that pop up on a well known auction site, they're fast and relatively inexpensive/low power, other than that the Samsung Pro range tends to have better endurance, but also a nasty habit of failing.
