I recently bought an external 32GB SLC SSD (in the form factor of an USB pendrive). Its random read/write speeds are quite insane (130+ MB/s both) while consumer SSDs like the Samsung 850 Evo barely manage 30 MB/s read/write. It's also advertised as very durable.

I plan on using a couple of those as ZFS metadata and small block caches for my home NAS, we'll see how it goes but people generally and universally praise the SLC SSDs for their durability.

> You're best bet for long-term reliability is to buy much more capacity than you need and try not to exceed >50% capacity for high write frequency situations. I keep an empty drive around to use as a temp directory for compiling, logging, temp files, etc.

That's likely true. I am pondering buying one external NVMe SSD for that purpose exactly.