Intel DC S3700 SSD Features New Proprietary Controller 54
crookedvulture writes "For the first time in more than four years, Intel is rolling out a new SSD controller. The chip is featured in the DC S3700 solid-state drive, an enterprise-oriented offering that's 40% cheaper than the previous generation. The S3700 has 6Gbps SATA connectivity, end-to-end data protection, LBA tag validation, 256-bit AES encryption, and ECC throughout. It also includes onboard capacitors to prevent against data loss due to power failure; if problems with those capacitors are detected by the drive's self-check mechanism, it can disable the write cache. Intel's own high-endurance MLC NAND can be found in the drive, which is rated for 10 full disk writes per day for five years. Prices start at $235 for the 100GB model, and capacities are available up to 800GB. In addition to 2.5" models, there are also a couple of 1.8" ones for blade servers. The DC S3700 is sampling now, with mass production scheduled for the first quarter of 2013."
Re:What's stored in DRAM? (Score:4, Informative)
What are context and indirection tables?
There are some details in this Anandtech article [anandtech.com] about the tables and the controller's use of DRAM.
Re:What's stored in DRAM? (Score:4, Informative)
Here's the short version - for full details, look at the Anandtech article an above user posted.
An SSD presents itself to the system as just a flat storage device, but internally it does a lot of weird mapping to do stuff like wear-leveling. The indirection table is basically "when the CPU asks for page X, we give them flash cell Y". It used to be a rather clever B-tree, but they ditched that for a flat array to get more consistent latencies.
I'm not sure what the context table is.
Re:Marketing Speech? 10 writes per day for five ye (Score:4, Informative)
The small amount of RAM on Intel's SSDs are not used to cache writes in a significant quantity. The idea that you'll only have to write the most popular cells once per shutdown is a dream. The main benefit of having a bit of reliable capacitor backup is that the drive can be less aggressive about forcing an erase of a large cell just to write a fraction of it out, therefore improving the write amplification [wikipedia.org] situation on the drive. You can even see limiting small writes as a factor in the claimed longevity of the drives if you dig into their spec sheets enough. I did an article comparing the 320 vs 710 series lifetimes [2ndquadrant.com], approaching from the perspective of one of those specialist things you allude to--database server operation. One of the things that I noticed there is that the longer lifetime of the 710 came with the restriction that you couldn't do nearly as many small random writes per second (write IOPS) and still hit the claimed lifespan target. If the cache was larger and really effective at postponing writes, that trade-off wouldn't exist.
Re:Proprietary (Score:2, Informative)
there are NOT faster and cheaper drives in the market with these features, there's nothing out there right now, to my knowledge, with is capacitor-backed cache and end-to-end integrity.
for the price intel is asking, its quite reasonable as well.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)