Features
The S3500 SATA MLC Enterprise Value SDDs have the following features:
Industry standard 1.8-inch, 2.5-inch, or 3.5-inch form factors
Support for a conventional 2.5-inch drive bay (2.5-inch SSDs), 3.5-inch drive bay (3.5-inch SSDs),
eXFlash drive bay (1.8-inch SSDs), or SSD drive bay (1.8-inch SSDs) on selected System x,
iDataPlex®, BladeCenter®, and Flex System™ servers
Cost-effective Intel 20 nm MLC NAND flash memory
SATA MLC solid-state drive with high read performance and consistently low latencies to fulfill
client needs in the enterprise space
High reliability and enhanced ruggedness
Energy saving, with as little as 5 W power consumption per drive
Absence of moving parts to reduce potential failure points in the server
S.M.A.R.T. support
Advanced Encrypting Standard (AES) 256-bit encryption
Full end-to-end data path protection
Thermal throttling to extend the life of the drive
Enhanced power loss data protection
Enterprise Value SSDs and Enterprise SSDs have similar read IOPS performance, but the key differences
between them is their endurance (or life expectancy) and write IOPS performance. SSDs have a huge but
finite number of program/erase (P/E) cycles, which affect how long they can perform write operations and
thus their life expectancy. Enterprise Value SSDs have a better cost per read IOPS ratio but lower
endurance and write IOPS performance compared to Enterprise SSDs. SSD write endurance is typically
measured by the number of program/erase cycles that the drive can incur over its lifetime, which is listed
as TBW in the device specification.
The TBW value that is assigned to a solid-state device is the total bytes of written data that a drive can be
guaranteed to complete. Reaching this limit does not cause the drive to immediately fail; the TBW simply
denotes the maximum number of writes that can be guaranteed. A solid-state device does not fail upon
reaching the specified TBW, but at some point after surpassing the TBW value (and based on
manufacturing variance margins), the drive reaches the end-of-life point, at which time the drive goes into
read-only mode. Because of such behavior, careful planning must be done to use SSDs in the application
environments to ensure that the TBW of the drive is not exceeded before the required life expectancy.
For example, for the S3500 240GB SATA 2.5-inch MLC Enterprise Value SSD to last in five years inside of
the 140 TB of TBW, the drive write workload must be limited to no more than 77 GB of writes per day. For
the device to last in three years, the drive write workload must be limited to no more than 128 GB of writes
per day.
S3500 SATA MLC Enterprise Value SSDs for System x
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