Wednesday, October 09, 2013

ICY News: Six SSD DC S3500 Drives And Intel's RST: Performance In RAID, Tested

"Intel lent us six SSD DC S3500 drives with its home-brewed 6 Gb/s SATA controller inside. We match them up to the Z87/C226 chipset's six corresponding ports, a handful of software-based RAID modes, and two operating systems to test their performance.
Intel hasn't launched any desktop-oriented drives based on its own SATA 6Gb/s controller yet. Those are reserved for some of the company's more enterprise-class SSDs. Both the SSD DC S3700 and S3500, which we reviewed in Intel SSD DC S3700 Review: Benchmarking Consistency and The SSD DC S3500 Review: Intel's 6 Gb/s Controller And 20 nm NAND, benefit from the processor's exceptional consistency, even if that latter model is better suited to read-heavy applications.
We're actually seeing an increasing number of drives similar to the SSD DC S3500, which are built to handle very specific workloads. Comparatively lower prices and solid performance in the applications they're designed for make up for the fact that all-around utility isn't a selling point. Given what you save on the initial investment, it's cheaper to simply tear the old drive out when it fails and pop in a new one. In certain environments, that's actually preferable to spending big on a high-endurance SSD from the outset, which may never need the pricier enterprise-class storage inside."

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