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
Enterprise Storage Bench - Microsoft SQL WeeklyMaintenance
Our final enterprise storage bench test once again comes from our own internal databases. We're looking at the stats DB again however this time we're running a trace of our Weekly Maintenance procedure. This procedure runs a consistency check on the 30GB database followed by a rebuild index on all tables to eliminate fragmentation. As its name implies, we run this procedure weekly against our stats DB.
The read:write ratio here remains around 3:1 but we're dealing with far more operations: approximately 1.8M reads and 1M writes. Average queue depth is up to 5.43.
The S3700 continues to be the fastest enterprise SATA SSD we've tested. In the past you had to choose between performance or endurance with the 520 and 710, with the S3700 Intel offers both.
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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.