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more. The last time Intel made their own consumer grade SSD top to bottom,
including the controller, firmware, and nan flash was back in 2008.
Yes, the era of the X25M and its
descendants. That architecture was with us for almost 2 and a half years of
product refreshes, including a move to halogen free manufacturing, changes to
the accompanying RAM cache, and upgraded firmwares with encryption and trim
support. But Intel never dramatically updated the controller itself, leaving
it struggling along at the end of its life cycle as a SATA 2 product amidst a
sea of SATA 3 competitors.
never to
return. Okay, but why so emotional, Lionus? There are tons of good SSD
options on the market. Well, Intel SSDs have always been, I'm holding this
backwards, on the expensive side for their performance, but their reliability
is legendary. Aside from being aware of
the reputation they've built with their other products and their competitive
warranty periods, I've also had the pleasure of touring their Fulsome campus
where much of the SSD work is done. And let me tell you, when Intel says
validation, they mean it. They had SSDs that were many months from release being
torture tested using equipment that smaller SSD manufacturers at the time
that I talked to hadn't even seen before. So, while I don't actually use
an Intel SSD in my own desktop PC, I do
use one in my home server and I do use
one in my wife's PC because let me tell you guys, and the married ones of you
can uh probably relate to this. When it comes to your own, you know, boot drive
dying, it sucks, but you're probably prepared. When your wife's drive dies
and she loses all her junk because she wasn't using the bleeping NAS like you
told her to, she will find a way to make it your fault. And it really sucks. And
that is what keeps me excited about this drive reliability. Because frankly, the
performance is not earthshattering. At PAX Prime 2013, Intel was hinting at a
user overclockable SSD with unheard of
performance. And at the time, I said, "That's insane. I hope they just tune
the hardware to bring a competitive performance-oriented drive to market,
but don't compromise data integrity. And Intel, predictable to a fault, did just
that. An untext review, which I'll link in the video description for your
convenience, covers the bases pretty well as far as performance goes. The
quick summary, though, is this. The drive builds on the same DNA as the
S3500 and S3700, which are both enterprise products. And while peak
performance isn't at the top of the charts, the 730's ability to
consistently perform its best even when it's full or being hit with a lot of
data over an extended period of time is topnotch. The extended summary is a bit
more complicated and includes a longer series of consumer versus enterprise
trade-offs. First up, Intel is using the
same controller and MLC HET for both
uses and is using the same combination of die screening and an increase in the
drives page programming cycle to achieve up to six times better endurance than
regular MLC NAND. That's where the 5-year warranty comes from. But for the
consumer version, they are also aggressively ramping up the clock speed
of the controller by 50% and they increased the interface speed on the nan
flash as well. Next up, we get robust
power loss protection with a pair of capacitors that will allow the 1 gig of
RAM cache to dump its data to the flash, but we are sacrificing full drive
encryption and the normally low power that SSDs consume to the PC hardware
gods. So, the 730 will keep your data safe as long as no one physically steals
it, which they probably won't since you won't be putting this drive in a laptop.
It actually consumes more power than a 1 TB 2 and 1/2 in notebook hard drive. And
finally, the drive delivers excellent write performance, more important in an
enterprise or workstation environment, but lags behind in reads, which are
unfortunately more common in a consumer's daily life. So, I guess the
conclusion for this drive is this. All those trade-offs are either making you
groan and wonder why Intel even bothered
putting a super duper skull graphic and speed demon sticker on this thing or
those trade-offs are making you super excited because like me, you still have
a handful of firstg X25M deployed out
there that are all humming along and it's more about the long-term viability
of a product to you than the day one performance. Anyway guys, like and share
this video if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it, and leave a comment
on the Linus Tech Tips forum linked in the video description if you want to
discuss this product or if you have any constructive criticism for me and my
team. Also linked in the video description is our support link with options to buy t-shirts, give us a
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bunch. And as always guys, thanks for watching and don't forget to subscribe.