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ADVANCED WRITE TESTING
As we talked about in our Micron P400m SSD Review, SSDs have different performance states. Since the Intel SSD DC S3500 is an enterprise SSD, we will focus on steady state performance.
With the following tests, we stressed the drive using random 4KB write workloads across the entire span for at least 24 hours. This is more than enough to achieve steady state. The following graph is showing the latency and IOPS across an 11 hour span.
The above graph shows the 1 minute averages over 11 hours. Considering the tight clustering of latency with the S3700 and even the SM843, we were a little shocked how noisy the latency was for the S3500.
When we zoom in on the last hour, with one second intervals, the spread widens. Even though our average across the entire run was over 11,500 IOPS, the one second averages range from 9K to 13K IOPS.
Even though the standard deviation was higher than the SM843, there were no obvious outliers that would cause us major concern.
Two things concern me with this SSD. The power protection caps look rather outdated compared to other enterprise SSDs. Secondly, the SSD label indicates a +12V line is required along with the usual +5V. My OCZ SSDs only required +5V . What’s the +12V being used for?
dravo1 – The S3500/S3700s can operate on both the 5 and 12V rail. 12V is useful in enterprise rack systems where it may be more readily available than 5V. All of our testing was performed in systems using only 5V, so don’t worry too much.
what about the SM843 with tantalum caps? or the SM843T with super caps and e-mlc?
We can’t say much about products that are not released, but if the 843 had power loss caps, it would be much more attractive to enterprise. If they add a high endurance option, that would put it in a difference price/performance class, so it’s hard to tell how it would stack up,
they are just sold through oem like samsung was before their consumer SSD. Used to be microcenter was the only place to get samsung hard drives. SM843T is the same as the 840 pro as far as they are concerned the factory OP is higher. the 840 Pro only worked after we moved to 30% OP with some megascu love to the LSI 9266
The write endurance seems to be pretty low though! 450000GB/800GB = 562 cycles. Others do something like 2-3000!
You need to the into account the WA aswell, especially becouse it uses no compression, it will always be more than 1.
Yes, with the JESD standard, the write amplification is 5-7X, from my experience. If you are looking at a workload where WA=~1, you are looking at slightly over 3000 PE cycles.
Does it work with macbook pro early 2011, core i7, 500gb? looking to upgrade to SSD.
Of course it will.