Intel has officially announced its new Intel Solid-State Drive DC S3500 series, a latest SSD that will join the previously released DC S3700 and 910 series as a part of Data Center SSD family. Aimed to be used in read-intensive scenarios such as Web hosting, cloud computing and data center virtualization, the DC S3500 series aims to bring a major boost to cloud computing by replacing the traditional HDD and allowing data centers to save significant costs by moving to an all-SSD storage model.

While the S3700 series was based on Intel's new controller paired up with 25nm HET MLC NAND, the S3500 series uses the same controller but paired up with a more budget friendly but still quite good high-grade 20nm MLC NAND chips. As noted, you still get the same controller, similar firmware, same AES-256 encryption and power loss protection.

The bad side of the story is that S3500 is less focused on write-heavy applications and features less spare area than S3700 thus getting lower endurance, lower sustained 4K random write performance but also a much lower price. As it was the case with the S3700, the S3500 series will also be available in 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch form factors and while 1.8-inch is limited to 80, 240, 400 and 800GB capacities the 2.5-inc will also be available in all other including 80, 120, 160, 240, 300, 400, 480, 600 and 800GB.

The maximum sequential performance is set at up to 500MB/s for read and 450MB/s for write with maximum random 4K read and write performance set at 75k IOPS and 11.5K IOPS.

On the other hand with the price of around US $115 for an 80GB and US $979 for an 800GB is much cheaper than other enterprise solutions but still more expensive than consumer drives. Compared to Intel's S3700 which sell for around US $1800 it still sounds like a great deal.



Source: Intel.com.