It's probably like the skull on Intel's motherboards; just a logo that's been there for so long that it's become an icon of Intel in the consumer market. I still like the old peel-up-for-silicon Intel design on my SSD 530 though, but not that it matters since there's only one case that showcases SSDs (H440).
I intended describing it as 'tacky gamer bling' as being charitable. If I felt like being mean I'd've used something like 'eye searingly hideous' instead.
I find it endearing. I bought a 240GB version of the 730 precisely because of its boring, but very practical features relating to reliability and early warning if there are any problems, not because of its speed (because that version is actually pretty slow in some areas). It seems so out of place that it kind of makes for a good story.
Ever heard of their Extreme line of processors? Or Socket 2011 motherboards? Same deal. I think they also have the skull on their AIO liquid cooling kits (made for the Extreme processors). Just take it as a warning that nobody should buy it as it is overpriced compared to their normal goods.
I think is bad ideal add on general customer product some religion symbol.. ok skull isnt religion symbol, but yes between us satanists are technology enthusiasts too :)
Not satanic. Just a skull. But its really witty. The skull is tilted like its looking at a PC screen and that looks like a smile. Skin's blown away from the power of the hardware, I suppose. Note the electrical/electronic symbols hidden in the skull. Pretty good.
I bought one of these because of its wear tracking/ drive monitoring features, significantly better than crucial m500 power loss protection, high endurance, and long warranty. I didn't buy this SSD for gaming, yet I find the skull endearing. This drive certainly seems likely to live up to the "hardcore" image of the skull, at least in terms of reliability/durability.
No support for built in encryption, kills that product in my eyes. Sure, the consistency is nice, but I don't see ever using drives that don't have encryption capabilities. That, said I am much more security conscious than most consumers. I always secure wipe drives once I retire them. I care enough to make sure my drives have the on drive encryption enabled. These are for the people that think over much of the Intel brand and think Windows Firewall and Security Essentials are actually a good security choice.
I say having common sense is the best security choice, more so than any specific program/brand of firewall-antivirus.
I see the market for this SSD as near workstation class desktops @ semi-pro/pro setting (think small business). you would be secured behind your IT (camera, chassis intrusion alarm, etc). Not to mention your data on the SSD will be server-backed, negating most of the benefit of encryptions.
I honestly think Intel is no longer chasing true consumer/enthusiast (or anyone with price/performance considerations).
Since this SSD isn't optimized for mobile, encryption doesn't make all that much sense due to limited ATA password support on mainstream motherboards. Also makes sense that they want to differentiate from the enterprise drive.
Exactly. Encryption is more relevant in laptops and this clearly isn't a laptop drive. That being said I do not see a market for this drive. It's a tiny, tiny niche. The 840 Evo is faster and way cheaper, the M500 is like half the price albeit slower it has more features and I doubt one notices much difference in normal usage scenarios.
You can also use the whole disk encryption option in your OS (Windows Bitlocker, Mac FileVault, etc) if your drive doesn't have hardware encryption. The performance hit really isn't that bad, and it protects your data just as well as hardware encryption does. I've been using it on my work and personal laptops for years and it's never been a problem.
And the Evo is in a long line of SSDs that have consistently have drive failures for users within the span of several months, as seen on user reviews. Who gives a shit about faster when it's like playing lottery with using the drive anyway.
Seeing that the SSD market is a low margin market, I get the feeling that Intel's strategy is to use it's existing reputation as a "reliable" vendor of SSD solutions and milk it so to speak. So that means little competition from a serious price to performance stand point, and more focus on product margins.
I've reread the first page about 5 times and I still can't tell what controller is in this drive. There's reference to previous use of SF, but no indication of what's now in use.
From the text "Adopting the platform from the DC S3500/S3700", "The controller is the same 8-channel design as in the S3500/S3700 but runs at 600MHz instead of the 400MHz of the S3500/S3700.". From the table "Controller Intel 3rd Generation (SATA 6Gbps)".
@Death666Angel (!) Thanks for the controller parsing. A rather convoluted way for readers to arrive at an answer, but we get there in the end.
In a related matter the reviewer writes: "We use both standard pseudo randomly generated data for each write as well as fully random data to show you both the maximum and minimum performance offered by SandForce based drives in these tests. The average performance of SF drives will likely be somewhere in between the two values for each drive you see in the graphs."
However in none of the tables are the Sandforce drives identified. Apparently we're supposed to have memorized beforehand what controllers each drive uses. This is not some a mere quibble on my part. We have a couple of dozen workstations using SSD's, and because we work with a lot of incompressible data I do not buy drives with SF controllers.
Please AnandTech: if you're going to bother making technical distinctions of this kind, make it clear where they apply.
the meaning is conveyed either way, but I have always taken orientated in the same way I take "moneys'. While I understand the intent, it still sounds awkward and uneducated.
Hm, so the Oxford Dictionary recognized word "monies" sounds uneducated to you? And it seems that documentated and adaptated are perfectly fine and acceptable words as well. Just because you don't use them in every day language or they sound weird does not mean they are not correct. There are many different types of spoken and written English language. And making fun of one of the (correct) ways to write that language does seem, what's the word, uneducated. :P
The endurance figures must be wrong. They're quoting that the drive supports only 267 cycles before it dies (128TB / 480GB = ~267), which is absurdly low. This is supposed to be high endurance MLC, but even Samsung's TLC has multiple times higher endurance than that...
Perhaps Intel is assuming 3000 cycles and a worst case write amplification of 12. (If you aren't familiar with write amplification, see Anand's early SSD articles on this site.)
Intel previously claimed a write amplification of 1.1 way back in the G1 days. Are you saying that this drive has an order of magnitude worse write amplification than their oldest drives?
Remember that they are using enterprise metrics and not client metrics on this. It could be the you can be more flexible on the WA you can assume on client drives.
Perhaps, but don't you think that the order of magnitude reduction in claimed write endurance deserves a call out in the article, if only to explain why that's the case?
The 1.1 write amplification was presumably typical rather than worst case. I wouldn't expect the write amplification to be that much different from the G1. The large block and page sizes probably make write amplification a bit worse, but the algorithms may have improved a bit.
I agree with your comment below that it would have been nice if the reviewer had queried Intel about the endurance spec, rather than leaving us to speculate.
The endurance is based on a workload that consists mainly of 4KB random writes (I'm currently travelling and don't have the JDEC PDF at hand, but IIRC it was ~67% 4KB and then a variety of other IO sizes).
The figures Intel provide are in-line with others. E.g. OCZ rates the Vector 150 at 50GB/day for 5 years. Consumer-grade drives are not validated as extensively as enterprise drives, hence the endurance ratings are lower. Furthermore, it's mainly a way to force enterprises to use enterprise drives because otherwise they could just throw in some consumer drives and then get them replaced under warranty when the drives wear out.
"Even though the performance consistency on the SSD 730 is great, it's only mediocre in our Storage Bench 2013. The write performance of SSD 730 is class-leading but as our Storage Bench has more read than write operations, the SSD 730 loses to drives with better read performance."
Uh... your graphs show it near the top of the charts for read, and in the bottom half for write. This comment makes no sense.
Excellent point. This is review is filled with holes that tout this drive yet the numbers don't back it up.
For it's price the drive is a non starter. I have a Seagate 600 240GB which I purchased for $139, that is a staggering $110 less than the 240GB equivalent here from Intel. The 5-10% performance improvement this drive has over my drive is not worth the price difference. Intel resting on it's laurels as usual.
What was left out of this review and it is understandable is how it handles various RAID configurations over time. More than RAID 0 or 1. I think that may be the more realistic usage model.
I agree with most others. I am not seeing much traction for it because of pricing and lack of features. Maybe professionals. I'd need to look at this and the DC models to decide based on price.
I agree on the RAID comments, since this is an "enterprise" ssd lets see how it works in tougher environment. Put some in a RAID configuration and then compare them against the other RAIDed drives in your bin. Consistent performance is a critical parameter when you put drives in parallel as the slowest one on any operation slows down the whole array.
I disagree on the lack of features, I think a power loss (backup power caps) is much more likely than computer theft (encryption) of a desktop at my house. Maybe they had to turn off encryption because it was the slowest part of the silicon and prevented reaching these overclocking speeds.
Great synopsis and analysis of the evolution of SSDs since Intel's X-25M hey day, just as I recounted the events as well for the most part.
I just don't see how Intel will sell many of these at the listed MSRPs, from what I saw it is still slower than the top 3 SSDs on the market (Samsung 840Pro, Sandisk Extreme II, Samsung 840Evo 250+GB) and it is much later and more expensive than the Extreme II and 840 Evo at least.
I am slightly disappointed. The Intel DC brings SSD Random IO consistency to the table. At the time where you can actually still feel pause on some pretty decent SSD. It was good because we reached the upper limit of Seq Performance with no replacement for SATA 6Gbps in sight, and Random Read Write has nearly level off between most SSDs. Since then, most other top end SSD, from Latest Marvel Controller to Samsung has all provide very good consistency. As shown in the graph SANDISK Random IO variation are all well within 1x% range. And doesn't have Dot jumping everywhere on the graph. The same goes for Samsung as well. While Intel still brings the best consistancy performance, but it doesn't seems to me the tradeoff are worth it. From performance enthusiast perspective, Seq and Random IO still comes first. As shown in the Storage Bench the SSD 730 isn't the top performer, the highest power usage, and the most expensive as well.
What we need now is improvement on all front. Much faster Seq Performance, even PCI-E 3.0 x 2 will only brings us 2GB/s, which i guess will only take a year and half for SSD marker to saturate it. Faster Random IO, and finally much lower Power usage.
Considering you can buy two m500 drives for the price of one of the 730's, your better off raiding them together and getting superior performance, endurance, redundancy, and far less idle power consumption.
Cost aside, this controller makes no sense for anything but a SQL, Exchange, web or heavy IO file server. The only desktop platform that'll take advantage of the performance consistency is video editing, but at 240 and 480 GB the capacities aren't high enough.
"JEDEC's SSD spec, however, requires that client SSDs must have a data retention time of one year minimum whereas enterprise drives must be rated at only three months" I hadn't actually thought about this before for SSDs and after doing some checking around this seems to be the minimum retention time once the endurance cycles have been exhausted. Presumable this retention time is higher for sectors that are not exhausted. Does anyone know what sort of retention times could be expected from fresh/moderately used drives? The next question would be do controllers move once written data around to refresh this data and/or as part of wear leveling (like OS files that are untouched after the install)?
I don't know about your first question, but the answer is "yes" to your second question about the wear leveling. Controllers try to keep writes even across all blocks to keep endurance up.
Sorry, that was a badly worded question but yes I am aware that wear leveling exists. What I am asking is, if you write a file once and then only read from it for the next few years while the rest of the drive is being written/rewritten, will the controller intentionally rewrite or move that file? Whether it does it for wear leveling or to refresh "old" data is less important but would be nice to know, if it does.
SSD-spec NAND memory is supposed to have a 10 years data retention when fresh (0 write cycles). I haven't been able to find much real world data about it, but from a Samsung datasheet about their enterprise drives, inclusing those with TLC NAND memory (here http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconduct... ) one can extrapolate that for the rated endurance with sequential workloads at 3 months of data retention, TLC NAND cells would have to endure about 2000 write cycles. So very roughly, assuming it's the exact same memory of the consumer drives (no reasons to assume it's not the case) for these drives we have: 0 write cycles = 10 years retention, 1000 cycles = 1 year retention, 2000 cycles = 3 months retention. Torture tests by users worldwide have shown that at over 3000 write cycles, these drives have a data retention ranging from hours to days. So, we could further summarize this as:
cycles / data retention days 0000 3650 1000 365 2000 36.5 3000 3.65
If you plot these values you can see that there's an inverse exponential correlation between NAND wear and data retention.
It turns out I realized too late before clicking "reply" that for the 2000 cycles datapoint I used about one month of time instead of 3 months. It should be 90. It doesn't affect the end point I was making, though.
Parker . I can see what your saying... Margaret `s bl0g is impressive, last thursday I bought a great Porsche 911 from having made $8447 this past month an would you believe 10 grand this past month . this is certainly the most-comfortable job I've ever had . I began this nine months/ago and pretty much immediately began to bring home over $77, per-hour . Learn More W o r k s 7 7
None of samsungs drives have any form of power loss protection, so unless you really need that last bit of performance, I'd avoid them, especially since there are cheaper drives that do have that protection.
If you really do need top-of-the line performance, well, then your choice becomes considerably harder.
Power-loss protection isn't very important in a laptop or if someone has a good UPS on a desktop, or at least that's what I would think, so in those cases, samsungs look very good indeed.
It's interesting to note that both Crucial's M500 and intel's 730 have power-loss protection and a fairly high idle power. Does power-loss protection imply a high idle power?
This isn't DevSleep, it lower the idle power consumption even more. This is just HIPM+DIPM (Host/Device Initiated Link Power Management), which is supported by older chipsets as well. However, note that only mobile chipsets support HIPM+DIPM, which is why the power consumption is significantly higher when tested in a desktop environment (like most reviewers do).
The power loss protection in crucial drives like the m500 is supposedly very incomplete, and not nearly as good as it is with the 730, or in enterprise drives, so its comparing apples and oranges. I would however say that SSD's which are going to be used in laptops are in much less need of power loss protection, but more in need of low power consumption, whereas SSD's that are intended for desktop use don't need low power consumption, and are in much higher need of power loss protection.
This doesn't strike me as an especially impressive product given what is already out there. Frankly, it seems that SSD technology has settled to the point where the only thing that matters any more is price/capacity. Find me half TB SSD for $200 and I'll care.
til I looked at the receipt for $5432 , I accept that...my... cousin had been truley bringing home money part-time on there computar. . there aunts neighbour had bean doing this for only about 1 year and just paid for the mortgage on their home and purchased BMW M3 .
I was a big fan of the Sata II Intel SSDs but for Sata III I switched to the Samsung 830 Pro and then the Samsung 840 Pro as my SSD of choice. Seems it's time change up again to the SanDisk Extreme II (which was mentioned to be the new favorite SSD) and or the Intel 730 here.
However the Intel 730, for all it does well, does not seem to be completely optimized for the average home PC workload and the top performance is suffering. And you can't use it in a laptop. These seem to be big deal breakers to me. Given those limitations it seems the SanDisk Extreme II would still be Anandtech's favorite SSD. Did I get that right? And would the SanDisk Extreme II work well in a PS4 without trim? And as an aside, I would not mind a better paragraph as to why the SanDisk is a favorite. Is it the near Intel constancy combined with the fast performance - like a best of both worlds thing? Also when is SanDisk releasing that enterprise lite version of the Extreme II with power failure features?
Regarding hardware encryption- don't use it. Seriously, these days, can you really trust anything but open-source encryption not to have backdoors for NSA, FBI, GCHQ or any other intelligence, police or RIAA/MPAA agencies out there?
I do understand hardware encryption is faster, easier, more transparent. But there is no way to prove it's correct. And if it can be bypassed by government, it's useless.
How can you trust anything that you didn't write from the zero (including compiler >and< hardware)? Who is to attest that your compiler or compiler used to compile your favorite distro/software is not injecting backdoors? Who is to attest that your hardware does not have a firmware-level exploit that can be used to log keys?
Can you trust software with millions of lines of code that you did not write?
Nope, you can't. Even open source software has a history of lingering vulnerabilities that stuck for >ages< (Debian pseudo "random" number generator, for example).
If you think your communication is going to be targeted by any government, the best idea is to be as paranoid as it gets and use multiple measures perhaps including >both< hw. level and software encryption.
If you are, like majority of businesses, mostly concerned whether your disk might fall into wrong (criminal) hands, then disk-level hardware encryption would probably be not worse than software encryption.
Ouch! "(...) the chassis also gets very hot and uncomfortable to touch under load" should translate something like 50°C on the outside of the SSD, which means that the electrolytics will constantly be cooked. Granted, the Chemi-Con KZH are rather good ones (although not the most reliable out there) with a rating of 5000 hours at 105°C, but I've had rather bad experiences with any electrolytics running hot in unvented cases for extended periods of time. According to the Illinois Lifetime Calculator those caps should last for more than 20 years at 60°C and 12V, but personally I have my doubts that the power loss "protection" is still working up to spec while approaching end of warranty...
Funny, I actually just bought a Crucial M500 (240GB) for my ~6yr old HP DV6500 Media Laptop. I guess I was a little surprised to see generally this isn't even the fastest ssd lol. It's been a number of years since I've been a serious home builder, so I'm not fully in touch.
Anyway I'm blown away by what a difference it makes even in this ancient machine running Vista 64B with just 2GB ram.
NewEgg as of today (for the next 24 hours or so?) is running a special on this drive, $379.99 for the 480GB model, which makes it a lot more appealing.
And today the price is $110 for the 240GB drive and $200 for the 480GB drive. The latter price is actually ten dollars less than the 512GB Crucial MX100. So Intel seems to be serious about selling these drives in quantity.
Yes, and similar sale prices in Canada as well. They still show the original MSRP in sales to try to make it seem like a better deal, but the actual MSRP seems to have come down significantly as well.
As far as I know, the 730 is the only drive with full power loss protection in the consumer segment, which, along with Intel's awesome drive monitoring functionality, makes this the most attractive SSD in my mind. It makes me wonder... what's the catch? I really don't care about the lower speed (especially on the 240gb model).
Why does Intel list this as not having "enhanced power loss protection" for either size of the drive? I found no mention of power loss protection on Intel's own product information listing for this. By contrast, the listings for the old 320, S3500, and S3700 show that they do have "enhanced power loss protection." This article states that the 730 has "similar" power loss protection to the S3700, so why isn't this listed on the intel product info page for the 730? This isn't another case of a company letting reviewers believe something other than what is the case, is it? Here's the link: http://ark.intel.com/products/81039/Intel-SSD-730-...
I'm curious to know the same thing. Every review across the internet mentions that feature, as well as the lack of encryption support and using HET nand, yet the intel documentation is exactly the opposite. I see intel did a documentation update in december.
The critical difference between the info provided in this current review and Intel's own specs at http://ark.intel.com/products/81039/Intel-SSD-730-... regarding enhanced power-loss protection and encryption support diminishes the the trust in Intel public information and reviews in generals. See what Intel had to say on this in early 2015, and even after that they did not change their official specs as on 2/27/16. What gives? http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/news/storage-news/r...
Intel is the only SSD manufacturer that didn't fail the stress test, every other SSD vendor FAILED miserably!! http://www.extremetech.com/computing/173887-ssd-st... I own 3 of the 520 series Cherryville 240GB's, 2 are almost 3 years old and still @100% life.
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gevorg - Thursday, February 27, 2014 - link
Whats up with the satanic skull? LOL!DanNeely - Thursday, February 27, 2014 - link
The tacky gamer bling is intended to convince corporate purchasing to buy the more expensive S3500 instead.littlebitstrouds - Thursday, February 27, 2014 - link
Well aren't you mean today. Just because it doesn't fit your style, doesn't mean you need to be a jerk about it.Homeles - Friday, February 28, 2014 - link
I thought it was funny!alyarb - Friday, February 28, 2014 - link
and insightful! it's not like you saw skulltrail boards in 2P workstations either. you have to pay extra to get the plain green board.ddriver - Friday, February 28, 2014 - link
This hard drive is poisonous.tabascosauz - Saturday, March 1, 2014 - link
It's probably like the skull on Intel's motherboards; just a logo that's been there for so long that it's become an icon of Intel in the consumer market. I still like the old peel-up-for-silicon Intel design on my SSD 530 though, but not that it matters since there's only one case that showcases SSDs (H440).Anonymous Blowhard - Friday, February 28, 2014 - link
sarchasm (sar-kaz-im)1. the gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it
DanNeely - Friday, February 28, 2014 - link
I intended describing it as 'tacky gamer bling' as being charitable. If I felt like being mean I'd've used something like 'eye searingly hideous' instead.Oxford Guy - Thursday, March 6, 2014 - link
It's really idiotic.Intel looks like a foolish old man trying to be cool with that.
amddude10 - Sunday, December 7, 2014 - link
I find it endearing. I bought a 240GB version of the 730 precisely because of its boring, but very practical features relating to reliability and early warning if there are any problems, not because of its speed (because that version is actually pretty slow in some areas). It seems so out of place that it kind of makes for a good story.iLovefloss - Thursday, February 27, 2014 - link
Ever heard of their Extreme line of processors? Or Socket 2011 motherboards? Same deal. I think they also have the skull on their AIO liquid cooling kits (made for the Extreme processors). Just take it as a warning that nobody should buy it as it is overpriced compared to their normal goods.nathanddrews - Thursday, February 27, 2014 - link
It's badaxe!NCM - Thursday, February 27, 2014 - link
Seriously. If I wanted a tasteless tattoo I'd go and spend the $10 on one.nathanddrews - Friday, February 28, 2014 - link
It was a joke for those that remember the D975XBX. I'm just mocking Intel's pathetic marketing attempts at being hard core.JlHADJOE - Thursday, February 27, 2014 - link
To make it fit with your Skulltrail system!ritabhatt - Thursday, February 27, 2014 - link
Is this WP 8 or 8.1? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMU51KeRIcsruthan - Thursday, February 27, 2014 - link
I think is bad ideal add on general customer product some religion symbol.. ok skull isnt religion symbol, but yes between us satanists are technology enthusiasts too :)zyxtomatic - Thursday, February 27, 2014 - link
I have to ask: What on Earth does a skull have to do with Satanism? It's just a skull with some stylized line art applied to it.zyxtomatic - Thursday, February 27, 2014 - link
I have to ask: What on Earth does a skull have to do with Satanism? It's just a skull with some stylized line art applied to it.Mr Perfect - Friday, February 28, 2014 - link
Because it's edgy and cool, and what the youf are looking for in a SSD... Or at least according to the guys in marketing it is.arvivaz - Monday, March 3, 2014 - link
Not satanic. Just a skull. But its really witty. The skull is tilted like its looking at a PC screen and that looks like a smile. Skin's blown away from the power of the hardware, I suppose. Note the electrical/electronic symbols hidden in the skull. Pretty good.star-affinity - Monday, March 17, 2014 - link
What's so satanic about it? I think it resembles quite well the skull we all carry around…amddude10 - Friday, November 28, 2014 - link
I bought one of these because of its wear tracking/ drive monitoring features, significantly better than crucial m500 power loss protection, high endurance, and long warranty. I didn't buy this SSD for gaming, yet I find the skull endearing. This drive certainly seems likely to live up to the "hardcore" image of the skull, at least in terms of reliability/durability.danjw - Thursday, February 27, 2014 - link
No support for built in encryption, kills that product in my eyes. Sure, the consistency is nice, but I don't see ever using drives that don't have encryption capabilities. That, said I am much more security conscious than most consumers. I always secure wipe drives once I retire them. I care enough to make sure my drives have the on drive encryption enabled. These are for the people that think over much of the Intel brand and think Windows Firewall and Security Essentials are actually a good security choice.PEJUman - Thursday, February 27, 2014 - link
I say having common sense is the best security choice, more so than any specific program/brand of firewall-antivirus.I see the market for this SSD as near workstation class desktops @ semi-pro/pro setting (think small business). you would be secured behind your IT (camera, chassis intrusion alarm, etc). Not to mention your data on the SSD will be server-backed, negating most of the benefit of encryptions.
I honestly think Intel is no longer chasing true consumer/enthusiast (or anyone with price/performance considerations).
DesktopMan - Thursday, February 27, 2014 - link
Since this SSD isn't optimized for mobile, encryption doesn't make all that much sense due to limited ATA password support on mainstream motherboards. Also makes sense that they want to differentiate from the enterprise drive.beginner99 - Thursday, February 27, 2014 - link
Exactly. Encryption is more relevant in laptops and this clearly isn't a laptop drive. That being said I do not see a market for this drive. It's a tiny, tiny niche. The 840 Evo is faster and way cheaper, the M500 is like half the price albeit slower it has more features and I doubt one notices much difference in normal usage scenarios.zyxtomatic - Thursday, February 27, 2014 - link
You can also use the whole disk encryption option in your OS (Windows Bitlocker, Mac FileVault, etc) if your drive doesn't have hardware encryption. The performance hit really isn't that bad, and it protects your data just as well as hardware encryption does. I've been using it on my work and personal laptops for years and it's never been a problem.chrnochime - Saturday, March 1, 2014 - link
And the Evo is in a long line of SSDs that have consistently have drive failures for users within the span of several months, as seen on user reviews. Who gives a shit about faster when it's like playing lottery with using the drive anyway.CrazyElf - Thursday, February 27, 2014 - link
Seeing that the SSD market is a low margin market, I get the feeling that Intel's strategy is to use it's existing reputation as a "reliable" vendor of SSD solutions and milk it so to speak. So that means little competition from a serious price to performance stand point, and more focus on product margins.NCM - Thursday, February 27, 2014 - link
I've reread the first page about 5 times and I still can't tell what controller is in this drive. There's reference to previous use of SF, but no indication of what's now in use.Did that info end up on the editing room floor?
Death666Angel - Thursday, February 27, 2014 - link
From the text "Adopting the platform from the DC S3500/S3700", "The controller is the same 8-channel design as in the S3500/S3700 but runs at 600MHz instead of the 400MHz of the S3500/S3700.". From the table "Controller Intel 3rd Generation (SATA 6Gbps)".NCM - Friday, February 28, 2014 - link
@Death666Angel (!) Thanks for the controller parsing. A rather convoluted way for readers to arrive at an answer, but we get there in the end.In a related matter the reviewer writes: "We use both standard pseudo randomly generated data for each write as well as fully random data to show you both the maximum and minimum performance offered by SandForce based drives in these tests. The average performance of SF drives will likely be somewhere in between the two values for each drive you see in the graphs."
However in none of the tables are the Sandforce drives identified. Apparently we're supposed to have memorized beforehand what controllers each drive uses. This is not some a mere quibble on my part. We have a couple of dozen workstations using SSD's, and because we work with a lot of incompressible data I do not buy drives with SF controllers.
Please AnandTech: if you're going to bother making technical distinctions of this kind, make it clear where they apply.
Mr Perfect - Friday, February 28, 2014 - link
That's strange, they used to label the drives in the charts with what controller was in them.Kristian Vättö - Saturday, March 1, 2014 - link
The controller is also listed in the table, although it's just "Intel 3rd gen" as to my knowledge it doesn't have any specific codename.As for the other feedback, the part you quoted it just a boilerplate that was we use in every review but I see that there's a need to update it.
Mipmap - Thursday, February 27, 2014 - link
"to invest in custom client-orientated silicon." oriented"There wasn't much competition and given Intel's resourced" resources
Death666Angel - Thursday, February 27, 2014 - link
Orientated/oriented is a preference thing. Neither option is wrong.CalaverasGrande - Thursday, February 27, 2014 - link
the meaning is conveyed either way, but I have always taken orientated in the same way I take "moneys'. While I understand the intent, it still sounds awkward and uneducated.redmist77 - Thursday, February 27, 2014 - link
Saying 'orientated' is as dumb as saying 'documentated' or 'adaptated.'Namey - Friday, February 28, 2014 - link
AgreededDeath666Angel - Friday, February 28, 2014 - link
Hm, so the Oxford Dictionary recognized word "monies" sounds uneducated to you? And it seems that documentated and adaptated are perfectly fine and acceptable words as well. Just because you don't use them in every day language or they sound weird does not mean they are not correct. There are many different types of spoken and written English language. And making fun of one of the (correct) ways to write that language does seem, what's the word, uneducated. :PMipmap - Thursday, February 27, 2014 - link
"build a drive significantly that was better than the other offerings."build a drive that was significantly better than the other offerings.
JarredWalton - Thursday, February 27, 2014 - link
Man, I seriously flubbed that sentence/paragraph on the editing pass. I think I tried to copy/paste to rearrange words but somehow missed. LOLGuspaz - Thursday, February 27, 2014 - link
The endurance figures must be wrong. They're quoting that the drive supports only 267 cycles before it dies (128TB / 480GB = ~267), which is absurdly low. This is supposed to be high endurance MLC, but even Samsung's TLC has multiple times higher endurance than that...KAlmquist - Thursday, February 27, 2014 - link
Perhaps Intel is assuming 3000 cycles and a worst case write amplification of 12. (If you aren't familiar with write amplification, see Anand's early SSD articles on this site.)Guspaz - Thursday, February 27, 2014 - link
Intel previously claimed a write amplification of 1.1 way back in the G1 days. Are you saying that this drive has an order of magnitude worse write amplification than their oldest drives?futrtrubl - Friday, February 28, 2014 - link
Remember that they are using enterprise metrics and not client metrics on this. It could be the you can be more flexible on the WA you can assume on client drives.Guspaz - Friday, February 28, 2014 - link
Perhaps, but don't you think that the order of magnitude reduction in claimed write endurance deserves a call out in the article, if only to explain why that's the case?KAlmquist - Friday, February 28, 2014 - link
The 1.1 write amplification was presumably typical rather than worst case. I wouldn't expect the write amplification to be that much different from the G1. The large block and page sizes probably make write amplification a bit worse, but the algorithms may have improved a bit.I agree with your comment below that it would have been nice if the reviewer had queried Intel about the endurance spec, rather than leaving us to speculate.
Kristian Vättö - Saturday, March 1, 2014 - link
The endurance is based on a workload that consists mainly of 4KB random writes (I'm currently travelling and don't have the JDEC PDF at hand, but IIRC it was ~67% 4KB and then a variety of other IO sizes).The figures Intel provide are in-line with others. E.g. OCZ rates the Vector 150 at 50GB/day for 5 years. Consumer-grade drives are not validated as extensively as enterprise drives, hence the endurance ratings are lower. Furthermore, it's mainly a way to force enterprises to use enterprise drives because otherwise they could just throw in some consumer drives and then get them replaced under warranty when the drives wear out.
Gigaplex - Thursday, February 27, 2014 - link
"Even though the performance consistency on the SSD 730 is great, it's only mediocre in our Storage Bench 2013. The write performance of SSD 730 is class-leading but as our Storage Bench has more read than write operations, the SSD 730 loses to drives with better read performance."Uh... your graphs show it near the top of the charts for read, and in the bottom half for write. This comment makes no sense.
creed3020 - Friday, February 28, 2014 - link
Excellent point. This is review is filled with holes that tout this drive yet the numbers don't back it up.For it's price the drive is a non starter. I have a Seagate 600 240GB which I purchased for $139, that is a staggering $110 less than the 240GB equivalent here from Intel. The 5-10% performance improvement this drive has over my drive is not worth the price difference. Intel resting on it's laurels as usual.
CalaverasGrande - Thursday, February 27, 2014 - link
orientated?eanazag - Thursday, February 27, 2014 - link
What was left out of this review and it is understandable is how it handles various RAID configurations over time. More than RAID 0 or 1. I think that may be the more realistic usage model.I agree with most others. I am not seeing much traction for it because of pricing and lack of features. Maybe professionals. I'd need to look at this and the DC models to decide based on price.
bitcoder - Friday, February 28, 2014 - link
I agree on the RAID comments, since this is an "enterprise" ssd lets see how it works in tougher environment. Put some in a RAID configuration and then compare them against the other RAIDed drives in your bin. Consistent performance is a critical parameter when you put drives in parallel as the slowest one on any operation slows down the whole array.I disagree on the lack of features, I think a power loss (backup power caps) is much more likely than computer theft (encryption) of a desktop at my house. Maybe they had to turn off encryption because it was the slowest part of the silicon and prevented reaching these overclocking speeds.
chizow - Thursday, February 27, 2014 - link
Great synopsis and analysis of the evolution of SSDs since Intel's X-25M hey day, just as I recounted the events as well for the most part.I just don't see how Intel will sell many of these at the listed MSRPs, from what I saw it is still slower than the top 3 SSDs on the market (Samsung 840Pro, Sandisk Extreme II, Samsung 840Evo 250+GB) and it is much later and more expensive than the Extreme II and 840 Evo at least.
iwod - Thursday, February 27, 2014 - link
I am slightly disappointed.The Intel DC brings SSD Random IO consistency to the table. At the time where you can actually still feel pause on some pretty decent SSD. It was good because we reached the upper limit of Seq Performance with no replacement for SATA 6Gbps in sight, and Random Read Write has nearly level off between most SSDs.
Since then, most other top end SSD, from Latest Marvel Controller to Samsung has all provide very good consistency. As shown in the graph SANDISK Random IO variation are all well within 1x% range. And doesn't have Dot jumping everywhere on the graph. The same goes for Samsung as well. While Intel still brings the best consistancy performance, but it doesn't seems to me the tradeoff are worth it. From performance enthusiast perspective, Seq and Random IO still comes first. As shown in the Storage Bench the SSD 730 isn't the top performer, the highest power usage, and the most expensive as well.
What we need now is improvement on all front. Much faster Seq Performance, even PCI-E 3.0 x 2 will only brings us 2GB/s, which i guess will only take a year and half for SSD marker to saturate it. Faster Random IO, and finally much lower Power usage.
Samus - Thursday, February 27, 2014 - link
Considering you can buy two m500 drives for the price of one of the 730's, your better off raiding them together and getting superior performance, endurance, redundancy, and far less idle power consumption.Cost aside, this controller makes no sense for anything but a SQL, Exchange, web or heavy IO file server. The only desktop platform that'll take advantage of the performance consistency is video editing, but at 240 and 480 GB the capacities aren't high enough.
amddude10 - Friday, November 28, 2014 - link
The 730's power loss protection is supposedly much, much better than that of the m500futrtrubl - Friday, February 28, 2014 - link
"JEDEC's SSD spec, however, requires that client SSDs must have a data retention time of one year minimum whereas enterprise drives must be rated at only three months"I hadn't actually thought about this before for SSDs and after doing some checking around this seems to be the minimum retention time once the endurance cycles have been exhausted.
Presumable this retention time is higher for sectors that are not exhausted. Does anyone know what sort of retention times could be expected from fresh/moderately used drives?
The next question would be do controllers move once written data around to refresh this data and/or as part of wear leveling (like OS files that are untouched after the install)?
Mr Perfect - Friday, February 28, 2014 - link
I don't know about your first question, but the answer is "yes" to your second question about the wear leveling. Controllers try to keep writes even across all blocks to keep endurance up.futrtrubl - Saturday, March 1, 2014 - link
Sorry, that was a badly worded question but yes I am aware that wear leveling exists. What I am asking is, if you write a file once and then only read from it for the next few years while the rest of the drive is being written/rewritten, will the controller intentionally rewrite or move that file? Whether it does it for wear leveling or to refresh "old" data is less important but would be nice to know, if it does.Solid State Brain - Tuesday, March 4, 2014 - link
SSD-spec NAND memory is supposed to have a 10 years data retention when fresh (0 write cycles). I haven't been able to find much real world data about it, but from a Samsung datasheet about their enterprise drives, inclusing those with TLC NAND memory (here http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconduct... ) one can extrapolate that for the rated endurance with sequential workloads at 3 months of data retention, TLC NAND cells would have to endure about 2000 write cycles.So very roughly, assuming it's the exact same memory of the consumer drives (no reasons to assume it's not the case) for these drives we have: 0 write cycles = 10 years retention, 1000 cycles = 1 year retention, 2000 cycles = 3 months retention. Torture tests by users worldwide have shown that at over 3000 write cycles, these drives have a data retention ranging from hours to days. So, we could further summarize this as:
cycles / data retention days
0000 3650
1000 365
2000 36.5
3000 3.65
If you plot these values you can see that there's an inverse exponential correlation between NAND wear and data retention.
Solid State Brain - Tuesday, March 4, 2014 - link
It turns out I realized too late before clicking "reply" that for the 2000 cycles datapoint I used about one month of time instead of 3 months. It should be 90. It doesn't affect the end point I was making, though.SiennaPhelpsigi - Saturday, March 1, 2014 - link
Parker . I can see what your saying... Margaret `s bl0g is impressive, last thursday I bought a great Porsche 911 from having made $8447 this past month an would you believe 10 grand this past month . this is certainly the most-comfortable job I've ever had . I began this nine months/ago and pretty much immediately began to bring home over $77, per-hour . Learn More W o r k s 7 7kmmatney - Saturday, March 1, 2014 - link
You can make that kind of money, in real life, as an engineer. Why is their a shortage of engineers in the U.S.again?Jflachs - Saturday, March 1, 2014 - link
So um, the 840 Pro is still the best SSD then, right?emn13 - Sunday, March 2, 2014 - link
None of samsungs drives have any form of power loss protection, so unless you really need that last bit of performance, I'd avoid them, especially since there are cheaper drives that do have that protection.If you really do need top-of-the line performance, well, then your choice becomes considerably harder.
amddude10 - Friday, November 28, 2014 - link
Power-loss protection isn't very important in a laptop or if someone has a good UPS on a desktop, or at least that's what I would think, so in those cases, samsungs look very good indeed.emn13 - Sunday, March 2, 2014 - link
It's interesting to note that both Crucial's M500 and intel's 730 have power-loss protection and a fairly high idle power. Does power-loss protection imply a high idle power?Kristian Vättö - Sunday, March 2, 2014 - link
The M500 supports low-power states (HIPM+DIPM) so in a mobile environment the power consumption is much lower: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/SSD/732hojnikb - Wednesday, March 5, 2014 - link
Is this related to devsleep or do older chipsets support that kind of low power consumption aswell ?Because in some reviews, m500 has quite high idle power consumption...
Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, March 5, 2014 - link
This isn't DevSleep, it lower the idle power consumption even more. This is just HIPM+DIPM (Host/Device Initiated Link Power Management), which is supported by older chipsets as well. However, note that only mobile chipsets support HIPM+DIPM, which is why the power consumption is significantly higher when tested in a desktop environment (like most reviewers do).amddude10 - Friday, November 28, 2014 - link
The power loss protection in crucial drives like the m500 is supposedly very incomplete, and not nearly as good as it is with the 730, or in enterprise drives, so its comparing apples and oranges. I would however say that SSD's which are going to be used in laptops are in much less need of power loss protection, but more in need of low power consumption, whereas SSD's that are intended for desktop use don't need low power consumption, and are in much higher need of power loss protection.CeceliaAFolger - Sunday, March 2, 2014 - link
hywoolfe9998 - Sunday, March 2, 2014 - link
This doesn't strike me as an especially impressive product given what is already out there. Frankly, it seems that SSD technology has settled to the point where the only thing that matters any more is price/capacity. Find me half TB SSD for $200 and I'll care.hojnikb - Wednesday, March 5, 2014 - link
U can get m500 480GB for ~250$ or less if u find a deal. Thats pretty cheap, if you ask me..RAYBOYD44 - Monday, March 3, 2014 - link
til I looked at the receipt for $5432 , I accept that...my... cousin had been truley bringing home money part-time on there computar. . there aunts neighbour had bean doing this for only about 1 year and just paid for the mortgage on their home and purchased BMW M3 .Neo Zuko - Monday, March 3, 2014 - link
I was a big fan of the Sata II Intel SSDs but for Sata III I switched to the Samsung 830 Pro and then the Samsung 840 Pro as my SSD of choice. Seems it's time change up again to the SanDisk Extreme II (which was mentioned to be the new favorite SSD) and or the Intel 730 here.However the Intel 730, for all it does well, does not seem to be completely optimized for the average home PC workload and the top performance is suffering. And you can't use it in a laptop. These seem to be big deal breakers to me. Given those limitations it seems the SanDisk Extreme II would still be Anandtech's favorite SSD. Did I get that right? And would the SanDisk Extreme II work well in a PS4 without trim? And as an aside, I would not mind a better paragraph as to why the SanDisk is a favorite. Is it the near Intel constancy combined with the fast performance - like a best of both worlds thing? Also when is SanDisk releasing that enterprise lite version of the Extreme II with power failure features?
Neo Zuko - Monday, March 3, 2014 - link
Or more exactly, why is the SanDisk Extreme II better than the Samsung 840 Pro for Anandtech?coder111 - Tuesday, March 4, 2014 - link
Regarding hardware encryption- don't use it. Seriously, these days, can you really trust anything but open-source encryption not to have backdoors for NSA, FBI, GCHQ or any other intelligence, police or RIAA/MPAA agencies out there?I do understand hardware encryption is faster, easier, more transparent. But there is no way to prove it's correct. And if it can be bypassed by government, it's useless.
psyq321 - Monday, March 10, 2014 - link
How can you trust anything that you didn't write from the zero (including compiler >and< hardware)? Who is to attest that your compiler or compiler used to compile your favorite distro/software is not injecting backdoors? Who is to attest that your hardware does not have a firmware-level exploit that can be used to log keys?Can you trust software with millions of lines of code that you did not write?
Nope, you can't. Even open source software has a history of lingering vulnerabilities that stuck for >ages< (Debian pseudo "random" number generator, for example).
If you think your communication is going to be targeted by any government, the best idea is to be as paranoid as it gets and use multiple measures perhaps including >both< hw. level and software encryption.
If you are, like majority of businesses, mostly concerned whether your disk might fall into wrong (criminal) hands, then disk-level hardware encryption would probably be not worse than software encryption.
amddude10 - Friday, November 28, 2014 - link
It could be helpful to avoid the wrong information getting into the hands of a competitor or something like thatHrel - Wednesday, March 5, 2014 - link
Those Seagate drives are looking better every day. I just saw a 240GB one on Newegg for $120!!!!preamp - Tuesday, March 11, 2014 - link
Ouch! "(...) the chassis also gets very hot and uncomfortable to touch under load" should translate something like 50°C on the outside of the SSD, which means that the electrolytics will constantly be cooked.Granted, the Chemi-Con KZH are rather good ones (although not the most reliable out there) with a rating of 5000 hours at 105°C, but I've had rather bad experiences with any electrolytics running hot in unvented cases for extended periods of time.
According to the Illinois Lifetime Calculator those caps should last for more than 20 years at 60°C and 12V, but personally I have my doubts that the power loss "protection" is still working up to spec while approaching end of warranty...
crazzeto - Tuesday, March 11, 2014 - link
Funny, I actually just bought a Crucial M500 (240GB) for my ~6yr old HP DV6500 Media Laptop. I guess I was a little surprised to see generally this isn't even the fastest ssd lol. It's been a number of years since I've been a serious home builder, so I'm not fully in touch.Anyway I'm blown away by what a difference it makes even in this ancient machine running Vista 64B with just 2GB ram.
binarycrusader - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
NewEgg as of today (for the next 24 hours or so?) is running a special on this drive, $379.99 for the 480GB model, which makes it a lot more appealing.KAlmquist - Saturday, November 22, 2014 - link
And today the price is $110 for the 240GB drive and $200 for the 480GB drive. The latter price is actually ten dollars less than the 512GB Crucial MX100. So Intel seems to be serious about selling these drives in quantity.amddude10 - Friday, November 28, 2014 - link
Yes, and similar sale prices in Canada as well. They still show the original MSRP in sales to try to make it seem like a better deal, but the actual MSRP seems to have come down significantly as well.As far as I know, the 730 is the only drive with full power loss protection in the consumer segment, which, along with Intel's awesome drive monitoring functionality, makes this the most attractive SSD in my mind. It makes me wonder... what's the catch? I really don't care about the lower speed (especially on the 240gb model).
wpcoe - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
I bought the 240GB version at Fry's last Thursday for US$98.00. I figure that at 40¢/GB how bad can it be.amddude10 - Thursday, November 27, 2014 - link
Why does Intel list this as not having "enhanced power loss protection" for either size of the drive? I found no mention of power loss protection on Intel's own product information listing for this. By contrast, the listings for the old 320, S3500, and S3700 show that they do have "enhanced power loss protection." This article states that the 730 has "similar" power loss protection to the S3700, so why isn't this listed on the intel product info page for the 730? This isn't another case of a company letting reviewers believe something other than what is the case, is it? Here's the link: http://ark.intel.com/products/81039/Intel-SSD-730-...mohaba - Friday, December 19, 2014 - link
I'm curious to know the same thing. Every review across the internet mentions that feature, as well as the lack of encryption support and using HET nand, yet the intel documentation is exactly the opposite. I see intel did a documentation update in december.Kob - Saturday, February 27, 2016 - link
The critical difference between the info provided in this current review and Intel's own specs athttp://ark.intel.com/products/81039/Intel-SSD-730-...
regarding enhanced power-loss protection and encryption support diminishes the the trust in Intel public information and reviews in generals.
See what Intel had to say on this in early 2015, and even after that they did not change their official specs as on 2/27/16. What gives?
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/news/storage-news/r...
NvidiaWins - Saturday, June 20, 2015 - link
Intel is the only SSD manufacturer that didn't fail the stress test, every other SSD vendor FAILED miserably!! http://www.extremetech.com/computing/173887-ssd-st...I own 3 of the 520 series Cherryville 240GB's, 2 are almost 3 years old and still @100% life.
The Gambler - Wednesday, August 12, 2015 - link
Hmm. I did put my 730 into a laptop. But considering how power hungry my laptop is anyway, it pretty much stays plugged in all the time.I could use it on my other PC, but that's a 10-year old Dell Dimension that recently got an HDD upgrade for archival purposes. No use there really.