Power Consumption

Intel's SSD DC S3700 can draw power on both 12V or 5V rails. Most 2.5" SATA drives pull from the 5V rail, however the S3700 seems to prefer the 12V if both are attached. The S3700 was the only drive I tested that drew any current on the 12V rail (and none on 5V), everything else was exclusively 5V. If your server supports it, Intel claims the S3700 can pull on both rails simultaneously.

As I alluded to in our S3700 architecture analysis piece, the Intel SSD DC S3700 draws quite a bit of power under load. It's easily the most power hungry Intel enterprise SSD, and it's the worst offender in all but one of our tests. The added power consumption isn't significant enough to be a problem in the datacenter, but it will likely keep the S3700 (or a not-HET derivative) from being a good fit for notebooks. Desktop use is another matter entirely, but Samsung's SSD 840 Pro controller's amazing idle power consumption is a perfect fit for mobile use. I suspect what we're seeing here is the result of Intel's focus on the enterprise market: the S3700 controller was just not built for mainstream mobile client use.

Enterprise SSD Power Consumption - Idle

Enterprise SSD Power Consumption - 128KB Sequential Writes QD32

Enterprise SSD Power Consumption - 4KB Random Writes QD32

Client Performance - AnandTech Storage Bench 2011 Final Words
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  • RealNinja - Tuesday, November 6, 2012 - link

    Looks like a nice enterprise drive. Will be interesting to see how reliable the new controller is in the "real world."

    For my consumer money...still gotta go with Samsung right now.
  • twtech - Tuesday, November 6, 2012 - link

    Looks like a nice workstation drive as well. With that kind of write endurance, it should be able to handle daily multi-gigabyte content syncs.
  • futrtrubl - Saturday, November 10, 2012 - link

    Umm, with that write endurance it should be able to handle daily multi-TERAbyte syncs, seeing as it is rated at 10x capacity/day for 5 years.
  • CeriseCogburn - Wednesday, January 2, 2013 - link

    I watched the interview, and saw all 3 of the braggarts spew their personal fantasies and pride talk, then came here to take a look, and I'm not impressed.
    I do wonder how people do that.
  • DanNeely - Tuesday, November 6, 2012 - link

    "I had to pull Micron's P400e out of this graph because it's worst case latency was too high to be used without a logarithmic scale. "

    Could you add the value to the text then?
  • crimson117 - Tuesday, November 6, 2012 - link

    Move away from NAND - to what?
  • stmok - Tuesday, November 6, 2012 - link

    ...To Phase Change Memory (PCM).
  • DanNeely - Tuesday, November 6, 2012 - link

    Everything old (CDRW) is new again!
  • martixy - Friday, November 9, 2012 - link

    Right... so we got that covered. :)
    Now we're eagerly awaiting the next milestone towards the tech singularity.
  • Memristor - Wednesday, November 7, 2012 - link

    To Memristor

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