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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"
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.
https://communities.intel.com/... Greater than 3.10 I am going to aim for 3.14 http://www.slideshare.net/Larr... ( Page 49 )
Funny, the specs say 70GB/Day, that is significantly different. This appears at the bottom of the linked HotHardware article on the right hand column of the spec sheet, and it is for the 1.2 TB model.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
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.
let's see...
pci express raid controller ~ 100
5 x 256gb ssd ~ 500
$600 vs $1200 (assuming $1 per gb for this intel card)
not sure about about speed. in theory, it should be faster due to raid or stripping (4 or 5 x 500mb/sec).
power and cable is a mess so definitely a con here.
fault tolerance is a plus from raiding.
upgradeable storage capacity is a plus.
otherwise, great for server farms.
From what I've seen, the standard reaction of SSD firmware when write integritiy can't be guaranteed is "commit suicide".
That was true of some of the OCZ Vertex series and other make/models. But this last generation of SSDs seemed to have made that a rarity even under the most extreme conditions.
In the case of this new Intel PCIe SSD card, I believe it has enough capacitance to commit a complete transistor write upon system power failure. As for the lost data for non-commited data?? Well, you're are running a journaling file system, yes? At least the volume won't get corrupted. But anyways yeah, seems like a solid drive you can rely on. Time will tell of course.
Life is not for the lazy.
So it looks like I can just drop one of these into my xubuntu 14.04 LTS desktop. Kewl!
Now if I can just convince SWMBO that I NEED one...
Sometimes the "writing on the wall" is blood spatter...
In cases like that, it's preferable to get some of the data back rather than none.
Uhhh...that is actually the stated policy for Intel, once your drive starts getting any errors, no matter how many spare blocks it has (or the fact your data is on it) instead of becoming a WORM drive which would be the sensible thing to do it throws a kill bit. You reboot? You be fucked.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.
Does Samsung even have a competing product?
Yes. SM915.
Which seems to not exist according to Google. Perhaps you mean the SM951? This is a mSATA card that runs over PCIe, not a desktop computer card that runs over a PCIe slot. They are completely different things. Look at the size of the Intel card, it is a full daughter board with many large flash chips. The Samsung has like 3 chips on it. I would expect this would be a much lesser part that isn't designed for enterprise level loads like the Intel card is designed for.
Apple is using Samsung for mSATA, not PCIe
Guess which PCIe 3.0 x4 drive the PCIe SSDs in the 2015 mbp and mb are based on.
Which is why only quoting a portion of the sentence is silly. I said they are electrically similar, however, they are physically very different.
and theirs doesn't push near the speed of this product as this one pushes 2.4GByte/sec read and 1.2GB/s write.
Yeah, it's not like a 512GB SM915 manages to outperform a 1.2TB 750 for real world I/O traces.
Oh.
Interesting, as the response time was faster for the Intel, not the Samsung, and the performance figures were less than half, I wonder if maybe AnandTech had their card misconfigured. The Samsungs on the test (of which one was slower and one was marginally faster) were both in AHCI mode, whereas the Intel was in NVMe mode, which according to the spec sheet isn't correct for the Intel (should also be in AHCI mode). Perhaps they had an old bios that doesn't support this card yet, or were in some other way messing up the test. SSDs don't magically perform at half speed, something has to be done to cause it to happen.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
-_-, ok, this true (just looked it up).
http://techreport.com/review/2...
No other manufacture (that I know of) purposefully bricks hardware! Wow! Their enterprise products OTOH will put it in read-only. It will be real interesting to see a stress-test on the 750 series. If they start dropping like flies, there will be a huge community backlash; especially for a first-generation flagship product. Meaning, they can lose the foothold into the market as quickly as it could be gained.
It will be interesting if Samsung has something in the works.
Life is not for the lazy.
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.
I have backups, every half hour or so.
Sometimes you can do quite a lot in half an hour that would be really annoying to replicate though. That's where it would be nice to at least have the drive be able to give you what it thought it had before it went into a failure state. Even if it's partly corrupted that may be fine, especially for coders who work with lots of little files.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.