Intel SSD 710 Endurance Results & SSD Rants by Artur Bergman

Here is some leaked data on the new Intel 710 SSD. It is good news for those using hybrid storage pools such ZFS like those available on OpenIndiana, Solaris, and Nexenta. If your pockets are deep enough you could even create zpools consisting of only model 710 SSDs with a reasonable expected life span. The 710 SSDs have a super cap which makes them write safe.

The new hardware has been endurance tested with pre-release firmware.  The largest model can supports writing 300GiB/day in 16KB blocks for 19 years! I am focusing on 16KB because this is the size of an InnoDB write in MySQL. This represents a significant increase in write-erase cycles as compared to previous models.

Algebra tells us that it should be able to support writing up to 1.2TiB/day for three years using 16KB blocks. This makes it a viable direct disk replacement in database servers. Serving as L2ARC in ZFS it will last a very long time. I like the sound of this.

Intel 710 series SSDs use of 25 nm MLC NAND flash, backed by 64 MB of DRAM for write cache. It comes in capacities of 100, 200, and 300 GB. Like many other SSDs the transfer rates promise to be in the 270MB/s range for reads and 210 MB/s for writes.

Another upside is performance.

Using 16K blocks, the device turns out 1000 IOPs for random writes.  This provides about 16.7x the write performance of a 7200 RPM hard drive [calculated as: 1000 IOPS/ ( 7200 RPM/ 60s/minute / 2 )=~ 16.667]

Intel Performance and Endurance test results on 710 SSD