A Look at Enterprise Performance of Intel SSDs

Final Words

The X25-E remains one of the fastest Intel SSDs in the enterprise despite being three generations old from a controller standpoint. The inherent advantages of SLC NAND are undeniable. Intel's SSD 520 regularly comes close to the X25-E in performance and easily surpasses it if you've got a 6Gbps interface. Over a 3Gbps interface, most of these drives end up performing very similarly.

We also showed a clear relationship between performance and drive capacity/spare area. Sizing your drive appropriately for your workload is extremely important for both client and enterprise SSD deployments. On the client side we've typically advocated keeping around 20% of your drive free at all times, but for enterprise workloads with high writes you should shoot for a larger amount. How much spare area obviously depends on your workload but if you do a lot of writing, definitely don't skimp on capacity.

What's most interesting to me is that although the 520 offers great performance, it didn't offer a tremendous advantage in endurance in our tests. Its endurance was in line with the SSD 320, if not a bit lower if we normalize to capacity. Granted this will likely vary depending on the workload, but don't assume that the 520 alone will bring you enterprise class endurance thanks to its lower write amplification.

This brings us to the final point. If endurance is a concern, there really is no replacement for the Intel SSD 710. Depending on the workload you get almost an order of magnitude improvement in drive longevity. You do pay for that endurance though. While an Intel SSD 320 performs similarly to the 710 in a number of areas, the 710 weighs in at around $6/GB compared to sub-$2/GB for the 320. If you can get by with the consumer drives, either the 320 or 520, they are a much better solution from a cost perspective.

Intel gives you the tools to figure out how much NAND endurance you actually need, the only trick is that you'll need to run your workload on an Intel SSD to figure that out first. It's a clever way to sell your drives. The good news is that if you're moving from a hard drive based setup you should be able to at least try out your workload on a small number of SSDs (maybe even one if your data isn't too large) before deciding on a final configuration. There are obviously software tools you can use to monitor writes but they won't give you an idea of write amplification.