Intel Announces Intel SSD DC S3700 Series

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As big data, high-performance computing (HPC) and cloud-computing applications push the demand for real-time access of data into the zettabytes, Intel Corporation announced today its next-generation data center solid-state drive (SSD), the Intel® Solid-State Drive DC S3700 Series, designed to remove storage bottlenecks and maximize multi-core CPU performance. The Intel SSD DC S3700 Series delivers fast, consistent performance and low latencies along with strong data protection and high endurance to help IT personnel support today's most demanding data center applications.
 
I am interested in the MLC-HET dies that Intel has developed more than this particular implementation. Why wouldn't you use TRIM if your OS has it available? Regardless of the performance of the GC, TRIM is still desirable.
 
Someone wanna tell me where exactly it says it 'doesn't need TRIM'?
 
I don't think Intel makes that claim about TRIM.

However, given that the S3700 can indefinitely sustain 140MB/s (35K IOPS) for 4K random write QD32 (without TRIM, of course), I think it is easy to see that TRIM is not necessary for good performance.

Just to be clear, the example I gave above is referring to writing multiple times the SSDs storage capacity continuously, in a sustained write (overwriting LBAs once the SSD has been filled the first time).

With most consumer SSDs, the QD32 4KiB random write performance drops to less than 20MB/s under a similar workload. Check anandtech's review of the S3700 for details.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6433/intel-ssd-dc-s3700-200gb-review
 
JoeComp said:
I don't think Intel makes that claim about TRIM.

However, given that the S3700 can indefinitely sustain 140MB/s (35K IOPS) for 4K random write QD32 (without TRIM, of course), I think it is easy to see that TRIM is not necessary for good performance.

Just to be clear, the example I gave above is referring to writing multiple times the SSDs storage capacity continuously, in a sustained write (overwriting LBAs once the SSD has been filled the first time).

With most consumer SSDs, the QD32 4KiB random write performance drops to less than 20MB/s under a similar workload. Check anandtech's review of the S3700 for details.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6433/intel-ssd-dc-s3700-200gb-review
Click to expand...

The S3700 is impressive in how tight it keeps the best scenario/worst scenario speeds as opposed to others, but TRIM should of course be used if available because it will be "better" in all likelihoods than GC alone.
 
mwroobel said:
but TRIM should of course be used if available because it will be "better" in all likelihoods than GC alone.
Click to expand...

It depends on the workload. For the kind of heavy, sustained workloads that are common for those who would opt for an enterprise SSD like the S3700, TRIM would not make much difference. TRIM is not a magic bullet -- even after the pages are marked invalid, the garbage must still be collected. But with a continuous heavy workload, there is no idle time to do GC. The reason the S3700 is so impressive is that it can do GC continously while the SSD is under a sustained heavy workload, with only a slight impact on performance. With the amount of reserved flash the S3700 has (the 200GB model has 264GiB of flash on board of which 29% is reserved), it makes little difference to its GC overhead whether a few extra pages are marked invalid by TRIM or not.
 
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My exuberance about it not needing trim is for scenario's where the RAID array doesn't support trim. Which is pretty much all the high end SAN/NAS boxes.
 
Dang these are beastly enterprise drives. Could use about 20-30 of 'em in my EMC SAN.
 
Neat looking drives, I want to see some more details on how it behaves in power-loss situations before I put my data on one.
 
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