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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.
From the review:
"We should also note the the SSD 750 Series comes with a 5 year limited warranty and its endurance is rated for 70GB of writes per day, with a total of 219TB written and a 1.2 million hour MTBF or meantime between failures. "
And by looking at some of the SSD endurance tests, I'd be surprised if this card can't beat 1-2PB before dying.
Hopefully Intel didn't add a suicide option into the firmware, like they did with the 335 SSD. As soon as the counter hits 0%, don't reboot or it's a brick. Doesn't matter if it has lots of spare sectors available for replacement, it's going to kill itself.
One step behind bleeding edge is the sweet spot for me. The last gaming rig I built is approaching 3 years and it's still going strong. The only bleeding edge part was the X79 Extreme 11 motherboard. I built it with one of the 750 gig Seagate hybrids which was later replaced with one of their 2tb hybrids. Works plenty fast for me. When I'm gaming, the next level generally finishes loading before the cut-scene is done so faster load times wouldn't make any difference.
Fail spectacularly is a vague term IMO. What were talking about is when the Intel firmware has determined that the SSD is in failure it will allow the drive to boot in a read-only state once. After you shut the power off once receiving the warning the drive commits suicide and will no longer boot or respond, in other words it bricks itself at the firmware layer and there is NO recovery.
What I'd argue is the correct failure mode is boot in read-only and warn that power loss will result in data loss but continue to boot in read-only format with a warning at each boot that files may be corrupt or lost. The intentional bricking aspect is just bad design IMO. The data you need to access could be on a part of the drive that's perfectly fine, in addition you may get the data warning at a time and place where it's simply not feasible to backup everything.
I completely disagree with Intel's failure model and think it's beyond stupid. It should warn the user of corruption and data loss but continue to boot. That way if the person is off somewhere they can backup critical files to either the cloud or a thumb drive and try to recover the non-critical data when they get back. Intentional bricking is just stupid.