The Intel SSD 710 (200GB) Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 30, 2011 8:53 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- SSDs
- Intel
- Intel SSD 710
Total Bytes Written & Spare Area
90K p/e cycles seems a bit high and I can't find any Intel documentation that actually quotes that number, it's just what I heard at the 710 briefing in San Francisco. Luckily Intel has another metric it likes to use: total bytes written.
You don't get TBW for client drives, but for enterprise drives Intel will tell you exactly how many tera or petabytes of random 4KB or 8KB data you can write to the drive. These values are "up to" of course as actual lifespan will depend on the specific workloads.
| Intel SSD Endurance Comparison | |||||||
| X25-E 32GB | X25-E 64GB | 710 100GB | 710 200GB | 710 300GB | |||
| 4KB Random Writes | 1.0 PB | 2.0 PB | 500 TB | 1.0 PB | 1.1 PB | ||
| w/ +20% Spare Area | - | - | 900 TB | 1.5 PB | 1.5 PB | ||
Doing the math these values work out to be about 5K writes per cell (~5243), however that's assuming no write amplification. Performing a 100% random write across all LBAs for a full petabyte of data is going to generate some serious write amplification. The controller in the 710 tends to see write amplification of around 12x for 4KB random writes, which would put the rated cycle count at just under 63,000.
There's just one problem. The 200GB 710 I'm basing these calculations on doesn't actually have 200GB of NAND on-board, it has 320GB.
Opening up the 710 that Intel sent me I found a total of 20 NAND packages on-board. This isn't surprising as Intel's controllers have always supported 10 parallel NAND channels, in this case the 710 uses two packages per channel and interleaves requests to them. Each NAND package however has 128Gbit (16GBytes) of NAND inside in the form of 2 x 8GB 25nm MLC-HET die. Multiply all of that out and you get 320GB of NAND inside this 200GB drive.
Of course 200GB is defined as 200,000,000,000,000 bits, so actual binary storage capacity is 186.3GiB. This is absolutely insane: over 41% of the NAND on the 710's PCB is set aside as spare area. We have never reviewed an SSD with anywhere near this much spare area before.
If we run the p/e count with 320GB as the actual amount of NAND available, it works out to be just under 40K p/e cycles per cell. The significant spare area on the 710 increases the drive's projected lifespan by 55%! Intel even recommends setting aside another 20% of the drive if you need a longer lifespan. An extra 20% spare area will give you another 50% increase in total bytes written. Tinkering with spare area just helps reduce write amplification, it doesn't magically make the NAND cells last longer.
If we believe Intel's specifications, MLC-HET actually sounds pretty decent. You get endurance in the realm of the X25-E but at significantly lower cost and with more reasonable capacity options.
Thankfully we don't need to just take Intel's word, we can measure ourselves. For the past couple of years Intel has included a couple of counters in the SMART data of its SSDs. SMART attribute E2h gives you an accurate count of how much wear your current workload is putting on the drive's NAND. To measure all you need to do is reset the workload timer (E4h) and run your workload on the drive for at least 60 minutes. Afterwards, take the raw value in E2h, divide by 1024 and you get the percentage of wear your workload put on the drive's NAND. I used smartmontools to reset E4h before running a 60 minute loop of our SQL benchmarks on the drive, simulating about a day of our stats DB workload.
Once the workloads finished looping I measured 0.0145% wear on the drive for a day of our stats DB workload. That works out to be 5.3% of wear per year or around 18.9 years before the NAND is done for. I'd be able to find more storage in my pocket before the 710 died due to NAND wear running our stats DB.
For comparison I ran the same test on an Intel SSD 320 and ended up with a much shorter 4.6 year lifespan. Our stats DB does much more than just these two tasks however - chances are we'd see failure much sooner than 4.6 years on the 320. An even heavier workload would quickly favor the 710's MLC-HET NAND.
But what about performance? SLC write speeds are much higher than MLC, but Intel's MLC performance has come a long way since the old X25-E. Let's get to the benchmarks.
The Test
We're still building up our Enterprise Bench data so forgive the lack of comparison data here. We included a number of consumer drives simply as a reference point.
| CPU |
Intel Core i7 2600K running at 3.4GHz (Turbo & EIST Disabled) |
| Motherboard: |
Intel H67 Motherboard |
| Chipset: |
Intel H67 |
| Chipset Drivers: |
Intel 9.1.1.1015 + Intel RST 10.2 |
| Memory: | Qimonda DDR3-1333 4 x 1GB (7-7-7-20) |
| Video Card: | eVGA GeForce GTX 285 |
| Video Drivers: | NVIDIA ForceWare 190.38 64-bit |
| Desktop Resolution: | 1920 x 1200 |
| OS: | Windows 7 x64 |
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Juri_SSD - Saturday, October 1, 2011 - link
Anand, I have read your previous articles and there where all somehow good. But this one misses one important thing and therefore there are many comparisons, that aren´t correct. When I saw the video, I just thought what is wrong with you.First of all: How dare you to compare a 50nm Flash-SSD with a 25 nm Flash-SSD and say that there is only a saving of cost because of use the cheaper MLC instead of SLC? That is so wrong! You can just shrink the 50nm SLC to 35nm SLC and you have lowered the price to half, then you go on and shrink it to 25nm and you have a further reduction in price and end up at a 1/4 price of an 50nm SLC-NAND just by shrinking the Cells.
Secondly: How dare you compare a 50nm FLASH-SSD with a 25nm Flash-SSD and then say that you have now more than 64 GB just because Intel wisely uses MLC? Hello? What about shrinking again? Your video is so wrong… 64 GB 50nm SLC -> shrinking -> 128 GB 34nm SLC -> shrinking -> 256 GB 25 nm SLC!
What do we have? Intel could make a 256 GB SLC-drive just by shrinking. Instead of pointing this out, you told the people how “good” Intel does his job by sorting out good MLC-NAND to compete against an very very very old, really old SSD. The only winner on this “good” job is Intel itself. The enterprise-consumer waits for a competitor who actually shrinks the SLC-Nand to 25nm.
Then again: You compare GB/Dollar. That is nice. And then you do a long speech about servers that really need all this p/e-cycles. But, if the servers really need all this p/e-cycles, why do you not compare p/e-cycles/Dollar? Perhaps, because the new 710-SSD really sucks on that comparison, also against an really old SLC-SSD like the Intel X25-E?
Then again, you can say: “All right, you are right Juri, but there are no 34nm SLC-Flash” Ups, this is also untrue, there are 34nm SLC-Flash-drives, so why you don’t compare GB/Dollar with these drives? You don’t know what I mean? How about Intel SSD 311? If you compare that 20 GB SLC 34nm NAnd-Flash drive, you see that the price of an 710-SSD you could easily make with a simple shrinking of SLC-NAND, just like I told in the first point.
I am really disappointed by your review.
PS: If you think my english is bad, you can try reading in german: http://hardware-infos.com/news.php?news=3946
lemonadesoda - Saturday, October 1, 2011 - link
I disagree with the statement that the SSD market is a race to the bottom. I think this is a lazy catchphrase that demonstrates a company's unwillingness to innovate. It is like saying the CPU or GPU or TFT or mobile handset business is a race to the bottom. Clearly, this is not true!There is plenty of room for Intel to innovate, differentiate, and gain margin on consumer SSD.
What SSD "technologies" would be interesting for the consumer? Encryption; Response-to-theft management; Wear leveling; SMART 2; Thunderbolt, etc. that would allow Intel to lead and to charge a premium on the consumer product.
Intel owns the Light Peak/Thunderbolt technology. Intel should get Thunderbolt onto it's PC chipset and get a range of SSDs onto Thunderbolt. Why are we using (e)SATA as a slow intermediary layering protocol when thunderbolt could do this and do it better? With Intel thunderbolt on the Intel mainboard, and compatible Intel SSD, we would no longer find PCIe based SSD or RAID0 SATA interesting. Intel could claim the enthusiast (not just enterprise) market in one swoop. And enthusiast drives consumer branding and perception.
There's still a lot of room for Intel in the SSD market. Or perhaps the current team has run out of ideas and motivation?
Friendly0Fire - Saturday, October 1, 2011 - link
Actually, no, there's a point you're missing. At the moment the biggest barrier to adoption with SSDs is... price. Specifically cost/GB. CPUs, GPUs and mobile handsets can be had for all price ranges, thus you see a good amount of spread between low and high end. CPUs and GPUs also have the advantage of being bundled in prefab computers, while mobiles get heavy price cuts through mobile plans.SSDs, however, are still restricted to a niche market, only seen as an optional component on high-end computers or bought directly as a separate piece. Sadly, most people still consider "performance" to be summarized by how many GHz and GBs your computer has. SSDs can improve performance tremendously, but good luck explaining what IOPS or bandwidth mean. Until prices are closer to that of magnetic drives, most people won't even be interested in learning about them.
So yeah, for the time being SSDs are a race to the bottom in the customer market. Performance is what I'd call good enough for 99.95% of computer users, even when you consider 3Gbps last-generation drives. What matters now is price drops.
EddyKilowatt - Tuesday, October 4, 2011 - link
I agree that price is the #1 barrier in the minds of potential adopters, but right after that comes reliability, and I think this looms equally large once people get used to the price and understand the performance benefit.Many are waiting for all the myriad 'issues' to get sorted out... until they do, it won't truly be a price-driven commodity market. And until they do, Intel can offer added value -- if they're careful about reliability themselves -- that justifies the price premium they'd like to charge.
Perhaps SSDs aren't as architecture and innovation driven as CPUs, but there's way more to them than just bulk memory mass produced at sweatshop wages.
AnnonymousCoward - Saturday, October 1, 2011 - link
Synthetic hard drive comparisons are not reality.Luke212 - Sunday, October 2, 2011 - link
Anand, Businesses do not run SSDs as single drives or raid 0. Failures being 1-2% it is too disruptive to business (unless they are read only). Can you consider testing these drives in Raid 1, which is how they are used in real life?Iketh - Monday, October 17, 2011 - link
That would depend on the raid controller's performance, not the drive.ClagMaster - Sunday, October 2, 2011 - link
"It wouldn't be untrue to say that Intel accomplished its mission."Means after the reader deciphers this ...
"It would be true to say that Intel accomplished its mission."
Do not do this. I have skinned engineers alive for making this kind of double-negative grammatical error in their reports I often have to shovel through. I hate teaching engineers English. Do make the change.
Your comments about Intel's leadership in the consumer SSD and enterprise SSD development pretty much hit the nail on the head.
Intel essentially created the consumer market for these SSDs. Not OCZ, Marvel and Sandforce. They are the dogs eating the crumbs.
Intel does some serious prototype testing before these products hit the shelves. Far more than its competitors.
This is another well balanced, high quality SSD.
ClagMaster - Sunday, October 2, 2011 - link
When I mean well balanced, I mean this is not a SSD for the obscessive-compulsive speed free with money to burn.This SSD is a good balance of cost, performance and reliability for the enterprise space. Its optimized for cost and reliability which limits performance somewhat.
Althoug slow compared to a Vertex 3, the SSD710 would still provide fine performance for consumer PC's as a boot drive.
AnnonymousCoward - Sunday, October 2, 2011 - link
"slow compared to a Vertex 3, the SSD710 would still provide fine performance"Wouldn't it be nice to have quantified results??? Like Windows boot time, time to launch programs, and time to open big files.
Synthetic benchmarks are both inaccurate, and provide no relative information. And synthetic benchmarks have been known to be inaccurate, on Anand's own site!
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http://tinyurl.com/yamfwmg
In IOPS, RAID0 was 20-38% faster; then the loading *time* comparison had RAID0 giving equal and slightly worse performance! Anand concluded, "Bottom line: RAID-0 arrays will win you just about any benchmark, but they'll deliver virtually nothing more than that for real world desktop performance."
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Anand stays stubborn to his flawed SSD performance test methods. If anyone is deciding between a Vertex 3 or an Intel, the single most important data would be the quantified time differences in doing different operation. You'll have to go to another website to find that out.