Intel SSD 730 (480GB) Review: Bringing Enterprise to the Consumers
by Kristian Vättö on February 27, 2014 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- SSDs
- Intel
- Intel SSD 730
AnandTech Storage Bench 2013
Our Storage Bench 2013 focuses on worst-case multitasking and IO consistency. Similar to our earlier Storage Benches, the test is still application trace based—we record all IO requests made to a test system and play them back on the drive we're testing and run statistical analysis on the drive's responses. There are 49.8 million IO operations in total with 1583.0GB of reads and 875.6GB of writes. As some of you have asked, I'm not including the full description of the test for better readability, so make sure to read our Storage Bench 2013 introduction for the full details.
| AnandTech Storage Bench 2013 - The Destroyer | ||||||||||||
| Workload | Description | Applications Used | ||||||||||
| Photo Sync/Editing | Import images, edit, export | Adobe Photoshop CS6, Adobe Lightroom 4, Dropbox | ||||||||||
| Gaming | Download/install games, play games | Steam, Deus Ex, Skyrim, Starcraft 2, BioShock Infinite | ||||||||||
| Virtualization | Run/manage VM, use general apps inside VM | VirtualBox | ||||||||||
| General Productivity | Browse the web, manage local email, copy files, encrypt/decrypt files, backup system, download content, virus/malware scan | Chrome, IE10, Outlook, Windows 8, AxCrypt, uTorrent, AdAware | ||||||||||
| Video Playback | Copy and watch movies | Windows 8 | ||||||||||
| Application Development | Compile projects, check out code, download code samples | Visual Studio 2012 | ||||||||||
We are reporting two primary metrics with the Destroyer: average data rate in MB/s and average service time in microseconds. The former gives you an idea of the throughput of the drive during the time that it was running the test workload. This can be a very good indication of overall performance. What average data rate doesn't do a good job of is taking into account response time of very bursty (read: high queue depth) IO. By reporting average service time we heavily weigh latency for queued IOs. You'll note that this is a metric we've been reporting in our enterprise benchmarks for a while now. With the client tests maturing, the time was right for a little convergence.
Even though the performance consistency on the SSD 730 is great, it's only mediocre in our Storage Bench 2013. The write performance of SSD 730 is class-leading but as our Storage Bench has more read than write operations, the SSD 730 loses to drives with better read performance. Whether the drive should focus on read or write performance is a question with no single correct answer because it's workload dependent. The heavy enterprise workloads the SSD 730 platform was designed for tend to be more aggressive in writes, so giving up some read performance makes sense there and carries over into the consumer version.
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wpcoe - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
I bought the 240GB version at Fry's last Thursday for US$98.00. I figure that at 40¢/GB how bad can it be.amddude10 - Thursday, November 27, 2014 - link
Why does Intel list this as not having "enhanced power loss protection" for either size of the drive? I found no mention of power loss protection on Intel's own product information listing for this. By contrast, the listings for the old 320, S3500, and S3700 show that they do have "enhanced power loss protection." This article states that the 730 has "similar" power loss protection to the S3700, so why isn't this listed on the intel product info page for the 730? This isn't another case of a company letting reviewers believe something other than what is the case, is it? Here's the link: http://ark.intel.com/products/81039/Intel-SSD-730-...mohaba - Friday, December 19, 2014 - link
I'm curious to know the same thing. Every review across the internet mentions that feature, as well as the lack of encryption support and using HET nand, yet the intel documentation is exactly the opposite. I see intel did a documentation update in december.Kob - Saturday, February 27, 2016 - link
The critical difference between the info provided in this current review and Intel's own specs athttp://ark.intel.com/products/81039/Intel-SSD-730-...
regarding enhanced power-loss protection and encryption support diminishes the the trust in Intel public information and reviews in generals.
See what Intel had to say on this in early 2015, and even after that they did not change their official specs as on 2/27/16. What gives?
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/news/storage-news/r...
NvidiaWins - Saturday, June 20, 2015 - link
Intel is the only SSD manufacturer that didn't fail the stress test, every other SSD vendor FAILED miserably!! http://www.extremetech.com/computing/173887-ssd-st...I own 3 of the 520 series Cherryville 240GB's, 2 are almost 3 years old and still @100% life.
The Gambler - Wednesday, August 12, 2015 - link
Hmm. I did put my 730 into a laptop. But considering how power hungry my laptop is anyway, it pretty much stays plugged in all the time.I could use it on my other PC, but that's a 10-year old Dell Dimension that recently got an HDD upgrade for archival purposes. No use there really.