A deal that we have been watching for some time has gotten better. Last week, the Intel DC S3700 refurbished drives were selling for $250 each. This week, it appears as though they are selling for only $200 each via Newegg on ebay (and get $4 in ebay bucks per drive as well.) These are likely going to move very fast at this price. High-end enterprise SATA drives at $0.25/GB make them extremely affordable for storage server or heavy VM drive use. In January 2015 these were a great deal at $550/ each and now they are down to almost one third that price.
We have users who have already looked at SMART attributes of these drives and are reporting less than one year power on, around 30 power cycles and 11TB written. (See here as an example.) This type of data seems to concur with what we have found with our used enterprise SATA SSD exercise where actual workloads were much lower than rated specs:
The Intel DC S3700 800GB drives feature power loss protection, high levels of reliability (AFR numbers by Intel are in the 0.2% to 0.44%) and high write endurance. The 800GB model is rated for 14.6PB or 10 drive writes per day (DWPD) for five years. From the users who have already purchased these drives, they are barely used.
We suggest grabbing these drives via Newegg on ebay for $200 each with free shipping and $4 in ebay bucks per drive. Since being posted on the STH forums this morning 11 have been sold in the last hour so we expect these drives to go fast. A backup can be using the Newegg site directly (losing ebay bucks) as sometimes the stock between the two sites differs.
Credit to the STH forums and member keybored for spotting the price drop. While data center SATA SSDs may be on their last legs of popularity, until Skylake-EP these are still some of the highest write endurance drives for SATA arrays.
I wish you buggers would remember that you have an international audience and put the country’s dollar type you are referring to. USD in your case I am assuming with the fact you are using Newegg and your claim of 200 dollars is well bellow what a large percentage of the world pays.
This is not news, it is spam.
I saw this last night, prices had gone up to $250/drive which is still really good! Bought two of em, thanks for the heads up!