The newly available Intel SSD DC S3710 and SSD DC S3610 series of server-grade drives both use a high-endurance variant of Intel’s own 20 nanometer multi level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory storage. 

Intel says the S3710 Series offers 25 percent faster performance in writing data to disk.

The S3710 succeeds the S3700, which had been around since 2012 at a slightly larger 25 nanometer NAND. Meanwhile, the older drive still uses a proprietary Intel controller with a 6Gbps host link. The new model, however, uses an updated version of that chip. The top capacity is up from 800GB to 1.2T.

The bottom line for data centers is that storage will do its job a lot faster. According to Intel, the new S3710 Series can offers 25% faster performance in writing data to disk than was available from the previous generation’s SSD.

The S3710 Series’s performance was rated up to 550 mbps sequential reads and 520 mbps sequential writes, plus up to 85,000 input-output operations per second IOPS) with random reads and 45, 000 with random writes.

The endurance rating is unchanged, however, with the new equipment running at 10 drive-writes per day for the length of the five-year warranty.

The second Intel rapid write medium, the SSD DC S3610 Series, is a new mid-level SSD which offers up to two tice the write performance of entry level data center SSDs.

The five-year warranty offered by the manufacturer remains the same. However, the endurance for these models is revised at three drive writes per day. The S3610, though not as speedy as the S3710, does produce a very similar peak. Most of the peak rates are comparable, but random writes top out at 28k IOPS.