Intel SSD 730 (480GB) Review: Bringing Enterprise to the Consumers
by Kristian Vättö on February 27, 2014 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- SSDs
- Intel
- Intel SSD 730
Final Words
It's great to see that Intel has not forgotten the enthusiast market. While the SSD 520 and SSD 530 weren't bad SSDs, they didn't exactly fill the shoes of X-25M—they were just another batch of SandForce drives, with more generally better validation. With the SSD 730 Intel finally provides a solution that's capable of filling the shoes that have been left empty for more than two years. However, the SSD 730 doesn't provide anything substantial in the terms of performance like the X-25M did.
The performance consistency of the SSD 730 is brilliant but nothing we've not seen from other OEMs before, and the consistency comes at the cost of peak performance. Even though consistency is an important metric regardless of the workload, I would say peak performance is still the dominant factor in most cases as client IO tends to happen in bursts, whereas in enterprises it's more of a constant flow of IO requests.
On top of that, the SSD 730 lacks some features that other high-end drives have. There is no TCG Opal 2.0 or eDrive support to enable proper hardware encryption, which is something that's slowly becoming a norm. Many companies and governments require encryption in all drives they use and that's a market the SSD 730 misses, although that was never its target market. Another weakness is the high power consumption, although neither that or the lack of encryption support plays a big role in the desktop market.
However, given that laptops and other portables cover most of the market nowadays, I feel it's not the best choice to completely rule that market out. Much like the Skulltrail platform whose logo adorns the SSD 730, this targets a very specific enthusiast niche, and the prices not surprisingly are going to be higher than "typical" consumer SSDs.
| NewEgg Price Comparison (2/25/2014) | ||||
| 240/256GB | 480/512GB | |||
| Intel SSD 730 (MSRPs) | $249 | $489 | ||
| Intel SSD DC S3500 | $300 | $605 | ||
| Intel SSD 530 | $180 | $399 | ||
| Intel SSD 335 | $200 | N/A | ||
| OCZ Vector 150 | $210 | $445 | ||
| OCZ Vertex 460 | $190 | $360 | ||
| Samsung SSD 840 EVO | $190 | $300 | ||
| Samsung SSD 840 Pro | $215 | $410 | ||
| Crucial M500 | $136 | $275 | ||
| SanDisk Extreme II | $233 | $450 | ||
| Seagate SSD 600 | $130 | $380 | ||
MSRPs are fairly high but as usual should be taken with a grain of salt. We are definitely dealing with premium pricing (though nothing close to the enterprise prices) but the SSD 730 is still rather competitive with the other high-end drives. Intel likely views the OCZ Vector 150 and SanDisk Extreme II as direct competitors and is hence pricing the SSD 730 accordingly.
All in all, the SSD 730 is a competitive option for users who seek maximum performance consistency but don't care about power consumption or encryption support. You'll have to sacrifice peak performance and the lack of an M.2 PCIe option may further limit the appeal in the long run. Given Intel's track record and the best-in-class endurance, the SSD 730 is best for the no-compromise enthusiasts and professionals who really need a reliable and consistent drive.
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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 m500