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New Intel Data Center SSDs

Intel has announced two new series of their 2.5-inch and 1.8-inch SATA data center solid-state drives. These are the upper-tier DC S3710 Series and mid-level DC S3610 Series. The DC S3710 replaces the previous DC S3700 Series, which was introduced back in late 2012. The high-level specifications for the entire Intel Solid-State Drive Data Center Family are listed here.

The Intel SSD DC S3710 Series is a 2.5” form factor and comes in 200GB, 400GB, 800GB, and 1.2TB capacities. The Intel SSD DC S3610 Series comes in both 2.5” and 1.8” form factors with the 2.5” coming in 200GB, 400GB, 480GB, 800GB, 1.2TB, and 1.6TB capacities and the 1.8” coming in 200GB, 400GB, and 800GB capacities. Both of the new SSD Series will use a high-endurance version of Intel’s 20nm MLC NAND, with a SATA interface and will have greater write performance compared to the previous models. The endurance rating for the DC S3710 is 10 drive writes per day for the length of the five-year warranty, while the DC S3610 is rated at 3 drive writes per day for five years.

Intel quotes these performance figures for the DC S3710 Series:

  • Sustained sequential read/write
    • 200GB: Up to 550/300MB/s
    • 400GB: Up to 550/470MB/s
    • 800GB: Up to 550/460MB/s
    • 1.2TB: Up to 550/520MB/s
  • Random 4k read/write
    • 200GB: Up to 85,000/43,000 IOPS
    • 400GB: Up to 85,000/43,000 IOPS
    • 800GB: Up to 85,000/39,000 IOPS
    • 1.2TB: Up to 85,000/45,000 IOPS

Intel also quotes these performance figures for the 2.5-inch version of the DC S3610 Series:

  • Sustained sequential read/write
    • 200GB: Up to 550/230MB/s
    • 400GB: Up to 550/400MB/s
    • 480GB: Up to 550/440MB/s
    • 800GB: Up to 540/520MB/s
    • 1.2TB: Up to 500/500MB/s
    • 1.6TB: Up to 540/500MB/s
  • Random 4k read/write
    • 200GB: Up to 84,000/12,000 IOPS
    • 400GB: Up to 84,000/25,000 IOPS
    • 480GB: Up to 84,000/28,000 IOPS
    • 800GB: Up to 84,000/28,000 IOPS
    • 1.2TB: Up to 84,000/28,000 IOPS
    • 1.6TB: Up to 84,000/27,000 IOPS

The S3710 Series has better write performance, and higher write endurance compared to the S3610 Series. As always, the larger capacity models typically have better performance than the lower capacity models from the same series. These drives are supposedly available now, although I have not found them listed for sale anywhere just yet. Here is the suggested retail pricing from Intel:

  • 1.2TB  DC S3710            $1909.00
  • 800GB DC S3710            $1249.00
  • 400GB DC S3710            $  619.00
  • 200GB DC S3710            $  309.00

 

  • 1.6TB  DC S3610            $1719.00
  • 1.2TB  DC S3610            $1289.00
  • 800GB DC S3610            $  839.00
  • 480GB DC S3610            $  509.00
  • 400GB DC S3610            $  419.00
  • 200GB DC S3610            $  200.00

These drives are a very attractive alternative to being price-gouged for internal flash-storage by your server vendor. I have had a number of customers use the older DC S3700 drives in new servers they have purchased, all with good results.

4 thoughts on “New Intel Data Center SSDs

  1. Hello,

    Do you know if it’s possible to have redundancy (raid/mirroring) on PCIe Devices from Intel ?

    Regards,
    Rikard Strand

    1. For PCIe storage devices, it is pretty common to use RAID 1 in Windows to get redundancy. For 2.5″ SATA/SAS drives, people typically use an internal RAID controller (hopefully the best one available).

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