Intel invited me to attend SC12 and participate in a webcast for the launch of its new DC S3700 SSD. I joined Roger Peene from Intel's SSD Solutions and we talked about the S3700 as well as answered your questions live. If you missed the webcast, you can find the pre-recorded video here. There's a great question about the future of NAND we discussed on the webcast that I'd highly recommend paying attention to.

Prior to the webcast, I had the chance to sit down with Arbin Kumar (responsible for Intel SSD reliability and validation), Allison Goodman (lead engineer on the S3700) and Roger Peene (Marketing Director for Intel's Datacenter SSD Solutions) once again to discuss the S3700 in greater detail. The discussion in the video below is from the first day I really learned about the S3700's architecture. The full discussion took several hours but the video below distills a lot of it down to 7 minutes. If you want to hear about the S3700 from the folks who actually had a hand in building the drive, I strongly suggest watching the video. Update: The video is back up.

Finally, at SC12 Intel rented a replica of the original series bridge from the starship Enterprise which we used as a backdrop for the webcast. Prior to the webcast airing, we had some fun on the bridge which you can check out in the gallery below.

At the end of the day it was a pretty fun experience. I learned quite a bit about Intel's NAND Solutions Group through this whole process. The SSD business is pretty unusual in that it's built around a replacement to a highly commoditized product (mechanical storage). It's surprising that we even have folks who typically play in high margin products even in this industry, but without them the market would be much worse off. I still remember what things were like with SSDs prior to the X25-M and even for the 12 - 18 months after its launch. The S3700 showed that there's still room for innovation even within the constraints of 6Gbps SATA, which should tide us over until SATA Express shows up.