The Intel SSD DC S3700 (200GB) Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 9, 2012 8:01 AM EST- Posted in
- Cloud Computing
- Storage
- IT Computing
- SSDs
- Intel
Final Words
Intel is back, but with an enterprise focus. The S3700 is one of the most exciting drives I've had the opportunity to test. Its architecture is more than just a better, faster evolution of designs that came before it, the S3700 is truly something new.
I view the evolution of "affordable" SSDs as falling across three distinct eras. In the first era we saw most companies focusing on sequential IO performance. These drives gave us better-than-HDD read/write speeds but were often plagued by insane costs or horrible pausing/stuttering due to a lack of focus on random IO. In the second era, most controller vendors woke up to the fact that random IO mattered and built drives to deliver the highest possible IOPS. I believe Intel's SSD DC S3700 marks the beginning of the third era in SSD evolution, with a focus on consistent, predictable performance. At least compared to the drives/controllers used in this article, Intel's S3700 appears to be ahead of the curve. I suspect the next major eras will be the transition to PCIe based interfaces, followed by the move away from NAND altogether (there may be another distinct period in between those two as well).
The S3700 is an extremely exciting SSD. For its indended market, the S3700 continues Intel's push to reduce the cost of enterprise storage. The days of spending thousands of dollars on a relatively small amount of NAND for use in a server are over. Intel is guaranteeing 1 - 14PB of write endurance on the S3700, which should be more than enough for the vast majority of workloads (even overkill for many). Performance and IO consistency are both very good, at least when dealing with 4KB random writes. With the exception of smaller-than-4KB, unaligned IO performance the S3700 is among the fastest enterprise SATA SSDs we've tested. It's a clear improvement over all of Intel's previous drives.
With the exception of power consumption, the S3700's controller is the true third generation successor to Intel's X25-M G2. It focuses on a new aspect of performance that, until we move to SATA Express, should be the target for all high-end SSD controllers going forward. Depending on the application, consistency of performance can be just as important as absolute performance itself. I can't stress this enough: we are largely saturating 6Gbps SATA and random IO is more than good enough for many, delivering a better experience should be everyone's target going forward.
It's good to see Intel back in the saddle with a competitive home grown controller, my only complaint here is that I wish we could have the same technology applied across the entire market. Although less profitable, the consumer SSD space is in need of more high quality competitors that push the industry forward. Without Intel aggressively playing in both the consumer and enterprise spaces I worry that we'll see a race to the bottom with manufacturers focusing on reducing cost without necessarily prioritizing innovation. The IO consistency offered by the S3700 is something I know I wish I had in my notebook. I frequently encounter hiccups in performance that I do my best to combat by throwing additional spare area at the problem, but a more fundamental architectural solution would be ideal.
Update: I'll be answering questions about the S3700 live from this year's SC12 conference. Head over here to get your questions answered!
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JonnyDough - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - link
There are a ton of new technologies that could replace NAND. There might even be a "betamax" or "HD DVD" in there that miss the mark and lose out to some better or cheaper tech. We'll just have to wait and see what comes to market and catches on. It won't be mere enthusiasts or gamers who decide, it will be the IT industry. It usually is.mckirkus - Tuesday, November 6, 2012 - link
On interesting point to note is that if you run benchmarks on a RAMDisk, you get random 4k write IOPS in the neighborhood of 600MB/s. So in that regard, flash has a long way to go before the 6Gbit/s limitations of SATA 3.0 really hurt enterprise performance.extide - Tuesday, November 6, 2012 - link
I am not sure I understand this. First of all random 4K against a ramdisk will be HIGHLY dependent on the hardware, and I am sure you could see wayy better numbers than 600MB/sec. Also, 600MB/sec is pretty close to 6Gbit/sec, anyways.jwilliams4200 - Friday, November 9, 2012 - link
I think mckirkus is trying to say that there is a lot of headroom before sustained 4KiB random I/O SSD throughput will saturate a SATA 6Gbps link.For example, the sustained QD32 4KiB random write speed for the S3700 is apparently less than 150MB/s (35K IOPS). It will need to double and double again before it saturates a 6Gbps SATA link
mayankleoboy1 - Saturday, November 10, 2012 - link
How long do we have to wait before SATA Express drives and interface get commercial ?justaviking - Saturday, November 10, 2012 - link
If I read this the "Update" section correctly, Oracle recommends modifying their settings to change the way the log files are written.Would it be possible to re-run the the Swingbench tests using the modified settings? I'd love to see how performance changes, especially on THIS drive, and then also on some others for comparison purposes.
blackbrrd - Saturday, November 10, 2012 - link
I am guessing most people will run their Oracle database behind a raid card with some nvram to cache, which would remove the problem if the raid controller combined the writes. It would be interesting to see the performance behind a typical raid controller card with nvram cache.iwod - Sunday, November 11, 2012 - link
I am a regular Anandtech Reader, ( actually it is on my RSS Feeds so i read it everyday ) and i dont ever record Anand doing a Review on Toshiba SSD. So when i saw the performance of the MK4001 i had to look it up in Google to know it is an SAS SLC Enterprise SSD.The article did eventually have a brief mention of its Spec. But i thought it was very late in the article. Would have help it the spec was actually listed out before hand.
It seems to me the Magic is actually in the software and not the hardware. A 1:1 mapping of NAND data Address table making Random Read and Write a consistent behaviour seems more like Software magic and could easily be made on any other SSD Controller with enough amount of RAM in it. The only hardware side of things that requires this tweak is ECC Memory.
And again we are fundamentally limited by Port Speed.
mmrezaie - Monday, November 12, 2012 - link
I agree!alamundo - Monday, November 12, 2012 - link
Given the enterprise focus, this drive seems to be competitive with the Intel 910 PCI card. It would be interesting to see the 3700 benchmarked against the 910.