Intel's old school X25-M SSDs leveraged the company's 50 nm flash and a controller designed in-house. That once-bleeding-edge SATA 3Gb/s-capable processor could be equipped with up to 10 channels of memory, which helped bolster its performance and potential capacity. Although the silicon went on to be revised for other applications, we as enthusiasts held a soft spot in our hearts for it, even as faster and less expensive competition rose to challenge Intel.
Initially, the advent of SATA 6Gb/s saw Intel left behind, though a tryst with Marvell's 9175 controller, followed by a SandForce partnership, at least kept the company visible.
Then, a little over a year ago, another proprietary processor surfaced in the SSD DC S3700 (Intel SSD DC S3700 Review: Benchmarking Consistency). We suspected, however, that we weren't going to see that controller in a mainstream, client-oriented drive. It was purpose-built for the rigors of enterprise deployment, and emphasized different strengths than what you typically find on the desktop. Nevertheless, we asked if the new chip would one day surface in that space, and were told it'd be a question of resources. Since Intel was being serviced by its solid LSI SandForce partnership, we figured it'd be a while.
The time has come, though. We finally have another modern consumer-oriented drive with an Intel controller. Dubbed the SSD 730 Series, it leverages the same platform as the company's SSD DC S3700 and S3500.

We're told that SSD 730 drives will cost somewhere around $1/GB, which means it won't be competing aggressively against some of our favorite alternatives in a value comparison. It should be able to deliver strong performance, though. This is a prosumer product, aimed at professionals who remember Intel's commitment to speed and reliability from the generation prior.
| Intel SSD 730 Series | 240 GB | 480 GB |
|---|---|---|
| Controller | Intel PC29AS21CA0 | |
| NAND | 20 nm IMFT , 64 Gb Die | |
| Sequential Read / Write | 550 / 270 MB/s | 550 / 470 MB/s |
| Random 4 KB Read / Write | 86,000 / 56,000 IOPS | 89,000 / 74,000 IOPS |
| Endurance | 50 GB writes/day | 70 GB writes/day |
| Form Factor | 7 mm, 2.5" SATA | |
| Warranty | Five years | |
Intel is introducing two capacities, 240 and 480 GB, though there's no reason the company couldn't also cook up a 960 GB model down the road.
So, the nuts and bolts include Intel's eight-channel controller, the company's special stash of 20 nm NAND, and 1 GB of DDR3-1600 cache. That's fairly similar to the SSD DC S3500, which we looked at in The SSD DC S3500 Review: Intel's 6 Gb/s Controller And 20 nm NAND.
Intel makes some very specific tweaks to this implementation, though. As OCZ discovered early on, a hotter controller can affect performance results. Intel took that information to heart and showed off an experimental SSD with parameters that could be user-modified (overclocked, if you will). But somewhere along the line, the company chose not to move forward with a tunable drive aimed at enthusiasts. Instead, turns the knobs for you. The SSD 730's controller runs 50% faster, with a 600 MHz clock rate, rather than 400 MHz. Also, its NAND interface is sped from 83 to 100 MHz. "Factory-overclocked", company reps call this. The marketing there is questionable.
The SSD 730 does include some interesting features to help make up for the emotional letdown. There are no hardware-accelerated encryption capabilities to speak of. Instead, you get better endurance ratings than most client-oriented SSDs can offer, along with power-loss protection courtesy of electrolytic capacitors soldered onto the PCB. Intel positions the SSD 730 as a RAID-ready device, diminishing the utility of on-drive encryption; a proper RAID controller should handle that. The capacitors are more interesting and useful, particularly in multi-drive setups.
Oh, and the SSD 730 gets a boss skull logo on the chassis, just like some of Intel's other enthusiast products. Enough talk. Let's open this thing up.

You'll have to deface the skull sticker to reach a hidden screw. From there, the top pops right off.

Right from the start, our analysis gets complicated. Most NAND packages are 29F32B08MCMF2 (14 x 32 GiB), but there's also a 29F64B08NCMF2 (1 x 64 GiB) and a 29F16B08LCMF2 (1 x 16 GiB). That means you get 528 GiB, or 566 GB of raw flash. This extra space is used for a parity-based redundancy system able to recover from a partial die failure.

Up top you see the SSD 730 Series' power-loss protection mechanism, two 105 °C-rated 47 μF capacitors. Below that are the two 512 MB DDR3-1600 DRAM packages.

The back of the PCB hosts the other eight NAND packages, both DRAM placements, and the Intel PC29AS21CA0 controller running at 600 MHz.
Our consumer storage test bench is based on Intel's Z77 Platform Controller Hub paired with an Intel Core i5-2400 CPU. Intel's 6- and 7-series chipsets are virtually identical from a storage perspective. We're standardizing on older RST 10.6.1002 drivers for the foreseeable future.

Updates to the RST driver package occasionally result in subtle performance changes. They can also lead to some truly profound variance in scores and results as well, depending on the revision. Some versions flush writes more or less frequently. Others work better in RAID situations. Builds 11.2 and newer support TRIM in RAID as well. Regardless, results obtained with one revision may or may not be comparable to results obtained with another, so sticking with one version across all testing is mandatory.
| Test Hardware | |
|---|---|
| Processor | Intel Core i5-2400 (Sandy Bridge), 32 nm, 3.1 GHz, LGA 1155, 6 MB Shared L3, Turbo Boost Enabled |
| Motherboard | Gigabyte G1.Sniper M3 |
| Memory | G.Skill Ripjaws 8 GB (2 x 4 GB) DDR3-1866 @ DDR3-1333, 1.5 V |
| System Drive | Kingston HyperX 3K 240 GB, Firmware 5.02 |
| Drive(s) Under Test | Intel SSD 730 480 GB SATA 6 Gb/s, Firmware: L2010400 |
| Samsung 840 EVO mSATA 120 GB, Firmware: EXT41B6Q | |
| Samsung 840 EVO mSATA 250 GB, Firmware: EXT41B6Q | |
| Samsung 840 EVO mSATA 500 GB, Firmware: EXT41B6Q | |
| Samsung 840 EVO mSATA 1000 GB, Firmware: EXT41B6Q | |
| SanDisk X210 256 GB, Firmware X210400 | |
| SanDisk X210 512 GB, Firmware X210400 | |
| Comparison Drives | Intel SSD 530 180 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: DC12 |
| Intel SSD 520 180 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: 400i | |
| Intel SSD 525 180 GB mSATA, Firmware: LLKi | |
| SanDisk A110 256 GB M.2 PCIe x2, Firmware: A200100 | |
| Silicon Motion SM226EN 128 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: M0709A | |
| Crucial M500 120 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: MU02 | |
| Crucial M500 240 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: MU02 | |
| Crucial M500 480 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: MU02 | |
| Crucial M500 960 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: MU02 | |
| Samsung 840 EVO 120 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: EXT0AB0Q | |
| Samsung 840 EVO 240 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: EXT0AB0Q | |
| Samsung 840 EVO 480 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: EXT0AB0Q | |
| Samsung 840 EVO 1 TB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: EXT0AB0Q | |
| SanDisk Ultra Plus 64 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: X211200 | |
| SanDisk Ultra Plus 128 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware X211200 | |
| SanDisk Ultra Plus 256 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware X211200 | |
| Samsung 840 Pro 256 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware DXM04B0Q | |
| Samsung 840 Pro 128 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware DXM04B0Q | |
| SanDisk Extreme II 120 GB, Firmware: R1311 | |
| SanDisk Extreme II 240 GB, Firmware: R1311 | |
| SanDisk Extreme II 480 GB, Firmware: R1311 | |
| Seagate 600 SSD 240 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: B660 | |
| Intel SSD 525 30 GB mSATA 6Gb/s, Firmware LLKi | |
| Intel SSD 525 60 GB mSATA 6Gb/s, Firmware LLKi | |
| Intel SSD 525 120 GB mSATA 6Gb/s, Firmware LLKi | |
| Intel SSD 525 180 GB mSATA 6Gb/s, Firmware LLKi | |
| Intel SSD 525 240 GB mSATA 6Gb/s, Firmware LLKi | |
| Intel SSD 335 240 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: 335s | |
| Intel SSD 510 250 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: PWG2 | |
| OCZ Vertex 3.20 240 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: 2.25 | |
| OCZ Vector 256 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: 2.0 | |
| Samsung 830 512 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: CXMO3B1Q | |
| Crucial m4 256 GB SATA 6Gb/s Firmware: 000F | |
| Plextor M5 Pro 256 GB SATA 6Gb/s Firmware: 1.02 | |
| Corsair Neutron GTX 240 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: M206 | |
| Graphics | MSI Cyclone GTX 460 1 GB |
| Power Supply | Seasonic X-650, 650 W 80 PLUS Gold |
| Chassis | Lian Li Pitstop |
| RAID | LSI 9266-8i PCIe x8, FastPath and CacheCade AFK |
| System Software and Drivers | |
| Operating System | Windows 7 x64 Ultimate |
| DirectX | DirectX 11 |
| Drivers | Graphics: Nvidia 314.07 RST: 10.6.1002 IMEI: 7.1.21.1124 Generic AHCI: MSAHCI.SYS |
| Benchmarks | |
|---|---|
| Tom's Hardware Storage Bench v1.0 | Trace-Based |
| Iometer 1.1.0 | # Workers = 1, 4 KB Random: LBA=16 GB, varying QDs, 128 KB Sequential, 8 GB LBA Precondition, Exponential QD Scaling |
| PCMark 7 | Secondary Storage Suite |
| PCM Vantage | Storage Suite |
Fantastic sequential read and write performance is a trademark of modern SSDs. To measure it, we use incompressible data over a 16 GB LBA space, and then test at queue depths from one to 16. We're reporting these numbers in binary (where 1 KB equals 1024) instead of decimal numbers (where 1 KB is 1000 bytes). When necessary, we're also limiting the scale of the chart to enhance readability.
128 KB Sequential Read
So long as we're limited by interface performance, there's not going to much interesting to see in an analysis of 128 KB sequential reads. It's fairly easy for each of these SSDs to serve up big numbers. The SSD 730 Series 480 GB edges out Intel's more enterprise-oriented drives, peaking in excess of 525 MB/s. And these are binary numbers, not decimal. If we switched up the units, we'd be reporting results closer to 560 MB/s.
128 KB Sequential Write
The SSD 730 Series beats the architecturally-similar SSD DC S3500 by a small margin, achieving almost 480 MB/s.
Granted, that's at higher queue depths. In the strictest sense, sequential accesses at high queue depths aren't really sequential. The operating system and drive see multiple threads performing sequential activity as random; consecutive requests are to logical block addresses more than one LBA away.
Here's a break-down of the maximum observed 128 KB sequential read and write performance with Iometer:

Intel eschews the fancy emulated SLC schemes employed by Samsung, SanDisk, and OCZ in favor of brute strength (lots of dies, a powerful controller, and fast flash). As you can see, Intel drives armed with the company's own controller fare better than a lot of the competition, particularly when it comes to writes. The SSD 730 Series goes up against the fastest client-oriented drives out there, while its more enterprise-class SSD DC S3x00 models fall to mid-pack.
We turn to Iometer as our synthetic metric of choice for testing 4 KB random performance. Technically, "random" translates to a consecutive access that occurs more than one sector away. On a mechanical hard disk, this can lead to significant latencies that hammer performance. Spinning media simply handles sequential accesses much better than random ones, since the heads don't have to be physically repositioned. With SSDs, the random/sequential access distinction is much less relevant. Data are put wherever the controller wants it, so the idea that the operating system sees one piece of information next to another is mostly just an illusion.
4 KB Random Reads
Testing the performance of SSDs often emphasizes 4 KB random reads, and for good reason. Most system accesses are both small and random. Moreover, read performance is arguably more important than writes when you're talking about typical client workloads.
Whether it's the controller's higher clock rate, the faster NAND interface, or a combination of both, the SSD 730 Series 480 GB ends up holding a good 10,000 IOPS over the SSD DC S3500 and S3700.
4 KB Random Writes
Random write performance is also important. Early SSDs didn't do well in this discipline, seizing up even in light workloads. Newer SSDs wield more than 100x the performance of drives from 2007, though we also recognize that there's a point of diminishing returns in desktop environments.

We see the same outcome here, except the SSD 730 Series peaks almost 33% higher than the SSD DC S3700 and a little under that over the S3500.
Random Performance Over Time
My saturation test consists of writing to each drive for a specific duration with a defined workload. Technically, it's an enterprise-class benchmark, where the entire LBA space of the SSD is utilized by a random write at high queue depths. But that's relevant here, since the SSD 730 Series drive has enterprise-class roots.
This is 12 hours of a 4 KB write with 32 outstanding commands. First, we secure erase each drive. Then, we apply the 4 KB write load, showing the average IOPS for each minute (except for the last 20 minutes, where we zoom in and show you one-second average increments).
After the first drive fill, performance drops off fast because the SSD 730 doesn't have any more free blocks to write to. Rather, old blocks have to be erased prior to subsequent writes. Nevertheless, Intel's drive starts off stoutly. The company's goals with its SSD DC S3700 were low write amplification accompanied by high steady state write performance and latency confined to a narrow range.
Those first two are of less concern on a client drive. Intel likely anticipates that most of the pounding applied to its SSD 730 will come from high-res video, after all.
The SSD DC S3700 employs a good deal more over-provisioning and better flash, leaving its SSD DC S3500 and SSD 730 much more similar (aside from the fancy firmware and overclocked components). That's good enough for a steady state 12,000 IOPS, measured in one-minute averages, though. This is a respectable number from a client drive. Obviously sacrificing more usable capacity for better steady state speed would help. But in this case, it's wholly unnecessary.
When I slice out a chunk of that line graph to observe one-second intervals, another story materializes. I've gone a step further to generate 100% write numbers (in pink), 50% reads and 50% writes (in green), and 70% reads and 30% writes (in blue). Clearly, the pink bar is at the bottom. With such a disparity between read and steady state write performance, the more write I/Os in the mix, the lower you'll see performance dip. To that point, a mix of 50/50 yields about 25,000 IOPS, while the 70/30 gives you around 40,000. But all three mixes of reads and writes exhibit the same limited spread as the more data center-oriented SSDs, with little variation from minimum to maximum. Like a marksman, the SSD 730 Series manages remarkably tight groupings for a client drive. This is especially awesome in a striped array, where the entire configuration is only as fast as its slowest member.
Here's a break-down of the maximum observed 4 KB sequential read and write performance with Iometer. The order the drives appear in our chart is determined by maximum combined read and write performance.
The 480 GB SSD 730 falls in amongst the top tier of mainstream drives. Maximum IOPS isn't the surest indicator of performance, which is why we use so many other tests to characterize speed as well. If you're going to sell a drive on its raw, unadulterated performance, though, you'd better be sure that SSD delivers.
Storage Bench v1.0 (Background Info)
Our Storage Bench incorporates all of the I/O from a trace recorded over two weeks. The process of replaying this sequence to capture performance gives us a bunch of numbers that aren't really intuitive at first glance. Most idle time gets expunged, leaving only the time that each benchmarked drive is actually busy working on host commands. So, by taking the ratio of that busy time and the the amount of data exchanged during the trace, we arrive at an average data rate (in MB/s) metric we can use to compare drives.
It's not quite a perfect system. The original trace captures the TRIM command in transit, but since the trace is played on a drive without a file system, TRIM wouldn't work even if it were sent during the trace replay (which, sadly, it isn't). Still, trace testing is a great way to capture periods of actual storage activity, a great companion to synthetic testing like Iometer.
Incompressible Data and Storage Bench v1.0
Also worth noting is the fact that our trace testing pushes incompressible data through the system's buffers to the drive getting benchmarked. So, when the trace replay plays back write activity, it's writing largely incompressible data. If we run our storage bench on a SandForce-based SSD, we can monitor the SMART attributes for a bit more insight.
| Mushkin Chronos Deluxe 120 GB SMART Attributes | RAW Value Increase |
|---|---|
| #242 Host Reads (in GB) | 84 GB |
| #241 Host Writes (in GB) | 142 GB |
| #233 Compressed NAND Writes (in GB) | 149 GB |
Host reads are greatly outstripped by host writes to be sure. That's all baked into the trace. But with SandForce's inline deduplication/compression, you'd expect that the amount of information written to flash would be less than the host writes (unless the data is mostly incompressible, of course). For every 1 GB the host asked to be written, Mushkin's drive is forced to write 1.05 GB.
If our trace replay was just writing easy-to-compress zeros out of the buffer, we'd see writes to NAND as a fraction of host writes. This puts the tested drives on a more equal footing, regardless of the controller's ability to compress data on the fly.
Average Data Rate
The Storage Bench trace generates more than 140 GB worth of writes during testing. Obviously, this tends to penalize drives smaller than 180 GB and reward those with more than 256 GB of capacity.

Intel's SSDs don't do magnificently, though they do well enough. Again, the SSD 730 Series is mixed up in a pack of M500s.
The average data rate consists of the total amount of busy time (the elapsed time, more or less) divided by the amount of data read and written. There's more to this trace test than that, though. We also want to look at latency, which is a good indicator when we combine it with this average data rate metric.
Service Times
Beyond the average data rate reported on the previous page, there's even more information we can collect from Tom's Hardware's Storage Bench. For instance, mean (average) service times show what responsiveness is like on an average I/O during the trace.
It would be difficult to graph the 10+ million I/Os that make up our test, so looking at the average time to service an I/O makes more sense. For a more nuanced idea of what's transpiring during the trace, we plot mean service times for reads against writes. That way, drives with better latency show up closer to the origin; lower numbers are better.
Write latency is simply the total time it takes an input or output operation to be issued by the host operating system, travel to the storage subsystem, commit to the storage device, and have the drive acknowledge the operation. Read latency is similar. The operating system asks the storage device for data stored in a certain location, the SSD reads that information, and then it's sent to the host. Modern computers are fast and SSDs are zippy, but there's still a significant amount of latency involved in a storage transaction.
The swiftest SSDs show up in the lower-left quadrant of the above plot. Within that rarefied space, the SSD 730 Series shows up where you'd expect it to: forward of the Samsung SSD in write latency, behind OCZ's newest Vector and Vertex dives in both measurements, and ahead of the Extreme IIs in read latency.

When we break out the individual mean service times, we see the SSD 730 from another angle. At the head of the pack are drives armed with Toggle-mode DDR NAND, mostly. The SSD 730 lands ahead of the M500 and its more dense 128 Gb dies, but behind the technologically-enhanced 840 EVOs and OCZ Vertex 450/Vector 150.
Mean write service times for the SSD 730 are good enough to land in seventh place, again behind drives equipped with Toggle-mode DDR NAND (except for the Vertex 450, which utilizes 20 nm synchronous flash). Ten percent behind the new SSD 730 is Intel's 200 GB SSD DC S3700 with half as many dies as the new 480 GB model.
Microsoft's Robocopy, a CLI directory replication command, gradually replaced the older xcopy. It's multi-threaded, has a ton of options, and generally outperforms vanilla Windows copy operations. Best of all, it's built right in to Redmond's operating system. Especially useful for network copy operations and backups, Robocopy doesn't stop to ask you one hundred questions while it copies over your music collection, either.
The reality of benchmarking file copy performance is that you need something fast to move data from and fast hardware to move it to. This is most important with SSDs. It doesn't matter if your drive can write sequentially at 500 MB/s if the source files are hosted on a USB 2.0-attached external hard drive. We're copying our test files from an Intel SSD DC S3700 to the drives in the chart below, taking source speed out of the equation (mostly). Moving to faster storage would increase the faster test disks' ultimate file copy performance. It begs the question though -- what is the point? Most users copying data from one source to another (in this case, a SSD) won't have the benefit of copying from a SSD RAID array or PCIe-based solid state storage, so relying on just one SSD as the source gives us the best case average.
There are 9065 files comprising the 16.2 GB payload. Some of the files are huge (up to 2 GB), while others are best described as tiny. On average, that's around 1.8 MB per file. The files are a mix of music, program, pictures, and random file types.
It's fair to say that this chart would look much different if we were copying from a hard drive to a SSD. Even if the disk drive's sequential throughput wasn't a bottleneck, it'd still choke on the smaller files.

We're not altogether disappointed by a 57-second result. That's 292 MB/s and 159 files/s. Pushing much higher is going to require a faster test platform, and we've developed a new file copy protocol to generate even more interesting results. Unfortunately, Intel only gave us a handful of hours to get the SSD 730 tested. Otherwise, you'd probably be looking at numbers from the new benchmark instead.
Finally, I want to introduce a new test I've been working on using JEDEC's 218A consumer workload trace to create a TRIM benchmark. It's not a neatly-packaged little utility you can run at home. Rather, this is a test scripted in ULINK's DriveMaster 2012 software and hardware suite.
DriveMaster is used by most SSD manufacturers to create and perform specific metrics. It's currently the only commercial product that can create the scenarios needed to validate TCG Opal 2 security, but it's almost unlimited in potential applications. There are various hardware components associated with the platform, such as a SATA/SAS power hub that allows the benchmarked drive to be power-cycled independently of the platform. Much of the benefit tied to a solution like DriveMaster is its ability to diagnose bugs, ensure compatibility, and issue low-level commands. In short, it's very handy for the companies actually building SSDs. And if off-the-shelf scripts don't do it for you, make your own. There's a steep learning curve, but the C-like environment and command documentation gives you a fighting chance.
This product also gives us some new ways to explore performance. Testing the TRIM command is just the first example of how we'll be using ULINK's contribution to the Tom's Hardware benchmark suite.

The suite ships with some built-in scripts, but also contains its own scripting language for extensibility and customization. This particular test uses JEDEC's published master trace of consumer I/O activity (similar to our Tom's Hardware Storage Bench trace). The read commands are removed from the trace, leaving write, flush, and TRIM commands. After secure erasure and writing preparatory data, the test commences. The trace is played against the drive four times using NCQ with and without TRIM, and DMA with and without TRIM. IOPS are measured and averaged every 100,000 commands.
On a 256 GB drive, each iteration writes close to 800 GB of data, so running the JEDEC TRIM test suite once on a 256 GB SSD generates almost 3.2 TB of mostly random writes (it's 75% random and 25% sequential). By the end of each run, over 37 million write commands are issued. If that sounds like a lot of storage traffic, it is.
The first two tests employ DMA to access the storage, while the last two use Native Command Queuing. Since most folks don't use DMA with SSDs (aside from some legacy or industrial applications) we don't concern ourselves with those. It can take up to 96 hours to run one drive through all four runs, though faster drives can cut the time in half, roughly. Because so much information is being written to an already-full SSD (the drive is filled before each test, and then close to 800 GB are written per iteration), SSDs that perform better under heavy load fare best. Without TRIM, on-the-fly garbage collection becomes a big contributor to high IOPS. With TRIM, 13% of space gets TRIM'ed, leaving more room for the controller to use for maintenance operations.

Here's the chart derived from our DriveMaster JEDEC TRIM test data. Looking at the rolling average of performance at each 100,000-command segment, the 480 GB SSD DC S3500 and SSD 730 are mostly even. The SSD DC S3700, with all its over-provisioning, fares even better.
Prior to running each iteration of the test, the drives are written to with random data twice. An SSD with known-good steady state performance is going to excel here.

This is the Intel SSD 730 Series and its instantaneous average, with TRIM enabled and without it. Underneath is a chart that also includes the SSD DC S3700 and S3500. The peaks are bursts of activity, and on a normal desktop-oriented drive, the TRIM-enabled test would register higher peaks, since the drive wouldn't be erasing and programming on the fly. That's not the case here, though.

The lower-end Intel drives to see some benefit from TRIM, but the SSD DC S3700 is unfazed, even without it.

We can boil the average performance of the final test with TRIM into a MB/s chart. Overall, the SSD 730 places well. SanDisk's X210 does the most with the least, though. It has just 7% of spare area and no over-provisioning.
Idle Power Consumption
Idle consumption is the most important power metric for consumer and client SSDs. After all, solid-state drives complete host commands quickly, and then drop back down to idle. Aside from the occasional background garbage collection, a modern SSD spends most of its life doing very little. Enterprise-oriented drives are more frequently used at full tilt, making their idle power numbers less relevant. But this just isn't the case on the desktop, where the demands of client and consumer computing leave most SSDs sitting on their hands for long stretches of time.
Active idle power numbers are critical, especially when it comes to their impact on mobile platforms. Idle means different things on different systems, though. Pretty much every drive we're testing is capable of one or more low-power states, up to and including DevSleep. That last feature is a part of the SATA 3.2 host specification. And while it requires a capable SSD and a compatible platform, enabling it takes power consumption down to a very small number.

Intel's SSDs are immediately split into two groups: the SSD DC S3500 and S3700 in the middle, and the SSD 730 at the very bottom. A higher controller clock rate and faster NAND interface demand a corresponding increase in power consumption. So, the performance-oriented SSD 730 registers the highest idle power use of any drive we've tested. That's not necessarily a big deal in a desktop or workstation, but it's probably going to keep you from installing one of these in a notebook.
PCMark 7 Average Power Consumption
If we log power consumption through a workload, even a relatively heavy one, we see that average use is still pretty close to the idle numbers. Maximum power may spike fiercely, but the draw during a PCMark 7 run is pretty light. You can see the drives fall back down to the idle "floor" between peaks of varying intensity.
All three Intel drives are fast, addressing PCMark 7's storage test and dropping back to idle quickly. That helps even out the average power consumption measurement through our run. Then again, the SSD 730 Series pulls nearly twice as much power as Intel's SSD DC S3x00s.

More aggressive performance specs register as a big jump in idle power consumption, especially. Though, given the intended enthusiast and prosumer audiences, we're not really sure how much of a knock that should be. As we've seen from other vendors, going all-out for the best possible results is a viable approach, so long as you know where the hardware is appropriate and where other options are more apropos.
Maximum Observed Power Consumption

The SSD 730 brings up the rear yet again, posting peak figures in excess of almost every other SATA-based drive. In the grand scheme of things, though, none of these SSDs use much power. In some sort of battery-powered devices, sure, you'd be looking at a problem. But in a desktop application, the hundreds of watts used by overclocked CPUs and graphics cards are more statistically relevant.
Word on the streets is that no self-respecting 11-year-old boy can resist computer hardware with a skull on it. It's probably a shame, then, that there aren't many 11-year-olds in the prosumer category, sporting wallets fat enough to drop twice as much money per gigabyte of capacity than competing SSDs.
With a load of benchmark data under our belts, we can make more enlightened recommendations, though. Intel's SSD 730 Series is fast, no doubt. It's an SSD DC S3500 at heart, and that's a very well-respected piece of solid-state storage technology. Better, the client-oriented version is optimized in all of the right ways for desktop and workstation use.

There's nothing wrong with enterprise roots. We're more demanding of our storage these days, and in some cases, features outweigh straight dollar-per-gigabyte calculations. In fact, we like that the SSD 730 isn't an entirely new platform. Jackson Ridge, the 730's code name, has an established track record already. Part of its good reputation does come from subtle nods to reliability, such as trapping the last four commands issued in the event of a drive failure, helping Intel diagnose the source of trouble. Ostensibly, that should lead to a better ownership experience over the product's life. A drive like this, modified for the varied workloads found in desktop environments, and you have a winner on paper (particularly when you get to keep the enterprise-class QoS).
Equipped with Intel's own eight-channel controller, 20 nm of NAND, and 1 GB of data cache, the SSD 730 is closely related to the enterprise-oriented SSD DC S3500. Though pricey at over $1/GB, this drive is covered by a five-year warranty and decidedly high-end. Read the Full Review
Intel SSD 730 Series 480 GB
High-End Solid-State Storage
Power consumption does suffer for the extra speed you're offered. In a high-end desktop or workstation, that's not a problem. But you won't want to use the SSD 730 Series in a notebook, even if it's a high-end one. After all, more power creates more heat, and that can be detrimental to performance. Ignore the mobile space altogether and you're able to do wonderful things like running a controller 200 MHz faster and speeding up the NAND interface.
There will be those who see the SSD 730 as a discounted SSD DC S3500 with better performance specs and love what it represents. Others will look to the large market of exceptionally fast client drives and balk at pricing in excess of $1/GB. It's a funny thing, though. We remember not too long ago when $1/GB was an exciting milestone. Truly, pricing is a relative yardstick. But with so many other very fast SSDs selling for so much less, it's difficult to specifically recommend paying more for this drive's benefits.

You already know that performance is what gets us excited. We're also hounds for value, though. And it's hard not to notice that for what you'd spend on two 480 GB SSD 730s, you could also get a pair of 960 GB Crucial M500s (and have $80 left over). Comparisons like that are powerful, and what the M500 might lack in speed or consistency, it makes up for with hardware acceleration of TCG Opal 2.0/eDrive. It even sports a power-loss protection mechanism of its own. Undoubtedly, the SSD 730 has the edge in rated endurance. But even that isn't the victory it appears to be on paper.
It's clear that many smart individuals have determined how to best extract enthusiast-class performance out of what was already a rock-solid enterprise-oriented SSD platform. What we end up with is useful speed, rather than inflated marketing numbers. There will always be a market for the Core i7-4960X CPUs and GeForce GTX Titan Black graphics cards. Intel's SSD 730 falls into that same category of prohibitively-priced, but ultra-high-end hardware. If this is the drive for you, then you already know it from our description of its features and compelling benchmark numbers. Otherwise, we'd be inclined to point you in the direction of the Core i7-4930Ks and GeForce GTX 780s of the world, which are still smoking fast, but a little friendlier to your wallet.







