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Intel Launches SSD 750 Series Consumer NVMe PCI Express SSD At Under $1 Per GiB
MojoKid writes Today, Intel took the wraps off new NVMe PCI Express Solid State Drives, which are the first products with these high speed interfaces, that the company has launched specifically for the enthusiast computing and workstation market. Historically, Intel's PCI Express-based offerings, like the SSD DC P3700 Series, have been targeted for datacenter or enterprise applications, with price tags to match. However, the Intel SSD 750 Series PCI Express SSD, though based on the same custom NVMe controller technology as the company's expensive P3700 drive, will drop in at less than a dollar per GiB, while offering performance almost on par with its enterprise-class sibling. Available in 400GB and 1.2TB capacities, the Intel SSD 750 is able to hit peak read and write bandwidth numbers of 2.4GB/sec and 1.2GB/sec, respectively. In the benchmarks, it takes many of the top PCIe SSD cards to task easily and at $389 for a 400GB model, you won't have to sell an organ to afford one.
"High Endurance Technology (HET) enables the DC P3700 Series to achieve 1.7TB drive writes per day over a 5 year drive life" "Life Expectancy 2 million hours Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF), 230 years"
You're also using 5 (2 per U) drive slots vs 1 (10 per U). And assume that your raid controller can push to the drives at pcie speed. Raid controllers aren't that fast, even from expensive manufacturers chips push the boundaries at 6Gbps and ~100,000 IOPS for the entire array.
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Those improvements are not necessary to reach the full speed of this drive, at 440K IOPS. In my own tests I've even seen a FusionIO drive hit 8GB/s under the old RHEL6 2.6.32 kernel. This new drive is at an amazing price/performance spot, but it's not exploring the upper limits of where the Linux kernel is shooting at.
Handling power off issues is a different problem. What the GP was referring to is how drives will fail spectacularly in the face of anything seen as corruption. You can see some examples in some longevity failure tests.
The problem in those cases was wearout, but the way that happens is scary. Let's say there's a bug in the firmware that causes a write to fail for no good reason. It's quite likely that the drive will kick into a mode where it doesn't trust itself anymore. And the way that will play out on most SSDs, the drive will shut itself down at the firmware level, so it isn't even picked up by the BIOS on boot anymore. What people would expect is getting read-only behavior there; instead they will find everything gone. And unlike most catastrophic spinning drive failures, you could easily hit the same bug that wipes out your data on both halves of a RAID-1 pair at the same time.