Recently we have been testing many datacenter oriented SSD options. A consistently solid performer is the Intel DC S3700. The combination of High Endurance Technology (HET) NAND, solid Intel controller and firmware and power loss protection serves as a solid base. The Intel DC S3700 has found its way into design wins at major OEMs such as HP, Dell and others. What that practically means is that the drives have been sold in very high quantities, and therefore show up on the secondary market quite often.
The 800GB model features the same 10 full disk writes per day for five years or 14.6PB of write endurance. Those specs are for full disk random writes. Since the drives are less than two years old at this point, and most drives do not operate close to the rated “worst case” workloads, drives found on the secondary market are likely to still have a high amount of writes left.
Launch pricing of the Intel DC S3700 800GB was $1880 and Intel ARK still has a MSRP of $1450 for each drive. Actual street pricing is in the $1400-$1500 range.
Currently there are two sets of Intel DC S3700 800GB drives on ebay for $550/ each. Both sets appear to be OEM drives from HP. For those that read our used Datacenter SSD Buyer’s Guide recently, that often means a lack of warranty. Also, HP Intel S3500/ S3700 SSDs are known to have fewer SMART attributes available. With that said, these are highly reliable drives and at around $0.68/GB for a large capacity drive they are approximately 1/3rd the price of new.
- First listing at $550 per 800GB HP drive (6 available)
- Second listing at $550 per 800GB HP drive (10 available)
This is great pricing since the Intel DC S3500 800GB drives are currently selling for around $450 each (see auction 1 and auction 2.)
One should note that we are likely to see new drives hit the market this year, and that Intel has been moving to PCIe based NVMe SSDs for performance and high-endurance applications with the Intel DC P3700 series. Still, these drives represent a solid value for higher endurance and capacity storage.
