Intel recently sent over a pair of its SSD DC S3700 drives at 200 and 800 GB. Our esteemed storage expert, Drew Riley, just put the finishing touches on his in-depth evaluation, which includes comprehensive consistency analysis, lots of performance detail, and our exclusive look at enterprise video streaming.
How do the drives do? Well, they're very fast, owning to Intel's first 6 Gb/s storage controller. But perhaps more important, they do a fantastic job of delivering a steady experience. Drew observed high power consumption, but the new drives do effectively drive down the price per gigabyte of capacity using high-endurance MLC flash memory.
As you'll see in the upcoming piece, the SSD DC S3700s rectify the value caveats we mentioned in Intel SSD 710 Tested: MLC NAND Flash Hits The Enterprise.
Its just that it would be 'cost prohibitive' from a money point of view (in terms of manufacturing, and of course no one would be able to buy it).
Second to that, the combination of reduced price (HP quoted me on an enterprise SSD a few months ago for only $18.72/GB) and endurance. The S3700 is rated for five full drive writes per day for five years under worst-case scenario data. This means the 200 GB model has an expected write endurance of greater than 3.5 PB.
Yeah, right, because $4/GB for RAM is cheaper than $1/GB for NAND.
Impressive looking drives, but I don't know when I'll be in the market for a new SSD. I've been pretty happy with my Vertex2. It's like less than half the speed as these newer SSDs, but it still boots up Win7 in a few seconds. I might get another SSD sometime down the road and install Win8 on it, but I don't feel rich enough at the moment.
Looking forward to a typcially great article "...As you'll see in the upcoming piece,..." to replace this video.
Crucial announced 960GB consumer oriented drives some time ago
2 TB now
Maybe I'm on the wrong website, because I feel all of you have got it wrong.
The Intel DC S3700 is absolutely not about being the biggest SSD around, or the fastest, or the cheapest. It's primarily about the being the first SSD we've ever seen to provide /consistent/ write IOPS over lengthy periods of use. And secondarily, it is about lowering the price of /enterprise/ SSDs to be within reach for small business, and to financially be an option for large data centers.
The Crucial m500 is a pretty cool drive, undoubtedly. I could see video editing suites making great use of them, or gamers with lots of cash to put into their favorite hobby. But the m500 would fall apart if you put it into a database server receiving continuous reads and writes until it fails. Its speed would be abysmal, and it would fail within months of heavy use from reaching its maximum write-endurance.