There is a large quantity of Intel DC S3710 400GB SSDs on the market that are selling for $0.50/GB or less. Every so often we highlight great deals from the forums, and this time we have a deal from member hnamanh. The Intel DC S3710 is Intel’s current top-of-the-line SATA SSD. It features the highest endurance in the Intel SATA SSD series at 8.3PBW and officially at 10 DWPD. For anyone unfamiliar with purchasing used enterprise SSDs, we have our Buyer’s guide to getting a used datacenter SSD inexpensively.
Here is the link to the listing: Dell Intel S3710 | ebay – If you are purchasing quantity, we have heard reports that this seller is taking best offers of $175/ each so pricing is between $175 and $200 per drive.
There are 498 drives available at the time of this writing so picking up a few for redundancy/ spares is certainly possible. Given the 2 million hour MTBF and the 8.3PB endurance rating, these drives should have plenty of life left on them. The Intel DC S3710 is intended to be a write optimized SSD. We commonly see these being used as low cost ZIL/ SLOG devices or journaling SSDs in other applications due to the high write endurance.
Given today’s market, we would expect used pricing from $0.20-$0.30 to represent a good deal on “bulk” SSD storage. Read optimized storage that is focused on price and capacity rather than write performance. Drives optimized for write speed and endurance are typically selling for $0.50/GB to $0.75/GB used, and those are often the older generation Intel DC S3700 drives. New the S3710 400GB drives sell for around $490/ each
One item one should be wary of, these drives appear to be Dell OEM. Using them in a non-Dell system will likely mean that typical SMART data we see on Intel retail drives is not available. Dell uses specialized firmware for its PERC controllers and out of band RAID management using iDRAC. This alters the firmware we have seen on Dell OEM Intel SSDs making some SMART data unavailable.
If you do have feedback on best offer pricing please post in this forums thread. In that thread, it is believed that the warranty on these devices may be a challenge. At the same time, Intel publishes annual failure rate and annual return rate figures of its data center SSDs at well below 1% and closer to 0.2%. With this pricing and that low of an AFR, it may make sense to get a few spares and self warranty the drives.
Again, here is the link to the listing: Dell Intel S3710 | ebay and we are suggesting a $175 best offer on multiple drives. Do see that thread for current best offer pricing the community has sourced.
So, for a RAID 1 OS drive in my new home/office server (Windows Server 2012 R2), how do you think this drive compares to the Samsung SM863 MZ7KM480HAHP-000MV 480GB SATA III 6GB/s 2.5″ SSD?
Either are likely overkill. Capacity is good but I would use lower cost drives than that SM863. Good forum topic but PM863 is plenty for that and cheaper e.g. here
Good question for the STH forums though.
How about the older Intel DC S3500?
We use the S3500 in many systems.
Patrick, I’ve been looking but thought you might know better: do you know any forum discussions on which of these drives would be better for a workstation OS drive (SM863, PM863, PM853T, S3500, S3710, etc.), or do you have any thoughts here? Your article comparing these (http://www.servethehome.com/samsung-sm863-pm863-benchmarks/) has been really helpful on performance comparison, but I’m trying to balance that with stability and endurance of course.
The PM863 and S3500 are more than ample for a workstation OS drive.