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Intel's New Desktop SSD Is an Overclocked Server Drive

Posted by samzenpus on from the new-kid-in-class dept.

crookedvulture writes "Most of Intel's recent desktop SSDs have followed a familiar formula. Combine off-the-shelf controller with next-gen NAND and firmware tweaks. Rinse. Repeat. The new 730 Series is different, though. It's based on Intel's latest datacenter SSD, which combines a proprietary controller with high-endurance NAND. In the 730 Series, these chips are clocked much higher than their usual speeds. The drive is fully validated to run at the boosted frequencies, and it's rated to endure at least 70GB of writes per day over five years. As one might expect, though, this hot-clocked server SSD is rather pricey for a desktop model. It's slated to sell for around $1/GB, which is close to double the cost of more affordable options. And the 730 Series isn't always faster than its cheaper competition. Although the drive boasts exceptional throughput with random I/O, its sequential transfer rates are nothing special."

6 of 111 comments (clear)

  1. sequential transfer by edmudama · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Hard for any SATA drive to distinguish itself on sequential transfers, given that SATA is capped around 550MB/s

    --
    More data, damnit!
    1. Re:sequential transfer by Luckyo · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Pretty much this. Vast majority of SSDs on the market today are very similar in terms of speed in normal usage, because the bottleneck is now in SATA. You can overclock it all you want, but you'll need to start pushing disks to PCI-E or similar bus for it to start to matter.

      And then there's the whole issue of "does it really matter when it's this fast on desktop?"

  2. Performance consistency versus peaks by Wrath0fb0b · · Score: 5, Interesting

    For many (but certainly not all) applications, especially when it comes to UI, what matters is 95% worst performance, not peak throughput. From the Anandtech review, that's where this drive really shines.

    Different tradeoffs have to be made for different workloads -- it can't be boiled down to a single (or even a set of) number(s). Some applications are far more tolerant of worst-case performance than others.

  3. Summary missed an important point by timeOday · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Not only is this "rated to endure at least 70GB of writes per day over five years," it also comes with a 5 year warranty. Given there's still skepticism about SSD reliability from some quarters, a 5 year warranty is unbeatable.

    I only wish Intel was offering this in a smaller size, say 100 GB. I think a SSD system drive + slow "green" HDD is a great combo in a desktop, and the price premium on this quality of SSD would be easier to swallow if the drive were $110 instead of $250 even though that would be the same $/GB.

  4. No kidding by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What you discover with SSDs is that for desktop usage pretty much any drive is "fast enough" and that faster doesn't much matter. I went from a SATA-2 SSD that was fairly slow even for that generation (WD Siliconedge) to a SATA-3 SSD that is fairly fast for this generation (Samsung 840 Pro) and I don't notice any difference. I can benchmark a difference, but I don't see any difference in load times and so on. SSDs are fast enough that they are making themselves not the bottleneck.

    That's also why there isn't a ton of interest in the PCIe SSDs. You can get way more performance, but it is a somewhat limited set of scenarios (on the desktop at least) where that would matter.

    1. Re:No kidding by nateman1352 · · Score: 5, Informative

      Citation Please.

      In truth current gen PCIe SSDs appear to the OS as a PCIe bus connected AHCI controller with a single disk that supports TRIM. There makes it completely transparent... it works exactly the same as a SATA SSD from a software perspective.

      Pretty soon we will start seeing next gen PCIe SSDs that expose themselves as an NVMe controller instead of an AHCI controller. Those SSDs will be backwards incompatible with AHCI but the command protocol and DMA interface enables extreme parallism so we will see pretty incredible performance for those SSDs. From a software stack perspective they use a new NVMe host controller and a new command set (ATA commands are completely gone!) So you need new drivers for it. They have OSS Win7/8/8.1 drivers available for NVMe but due to kernel limitations only the Win8/8.1 version of the driver is capable of supporting TRIM (Maybe that is where you got confused.) Win8.1 also have a NVMe driver in-box from Microsoft.

      Don't worry though, AHCI PCIe/SATA Express SSDs will be with use for a very long time esp. since Win7 is rapidly turning in to the next WinXP (the version that everyone likes and uses despite Microsoft's best efforts.)