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Intel DC S3700 SSD Features New Proprietary Controller
crookedvulture writes "For the first time in more than four years, Intel is rolling out a new SSD controller. The chip is featured in the DC S3700 solid-state drive, an enterprise-oriented offering that's 40% cheaper than the previous generation. The S3700 has 6Gbps SATA connectivity, end-to-end data protection, LBA tag validation, 256-bit AES encryption, and ECC throughout. It also includes onboard capacitors to prevent against data loss due to power failure; if problems with those capacitors are detected by the drive's self-check mechanism, it can disable the write cache. Intel's own high-endurance MLC NAND can be found in the drive, which is rated for 10 full disk writes per day for five years. Prices start at $235 for the 100GB model, and capacities are available up to 800GB. In addition to 2.5" models, there are also a couple of 1.8" ones for blade servers. The DC S3700 is sampling now, with mass production scheduled for the first quarter of 2013."
This is about right. MLC flash normally is rated for between 1k and 10k cycles. Newer flash is generally less as transistor sizes are shrunk to fit in more gbytes in the same die area.
A home PC will only write a couple of gigs a day under typical workloads, which turns out to about 5 full writes a year for even the small sizes. That would last you 4000 years assuming ideal wear leveling...
Basically, what they're saying is this will be absolutely fine for everything except outgoing mail servers and a few other specialist things.
The capacitor backup and write cache make wear leveling much much easier, since all frequently written to cells can be cached in ram, and only written once on shutdown, and the capacitor backup means even an unclean shutdown will save your data.