Intel Solid-State Drive DC S3700 Review

Performance Summary: The Intel DC S3700 series SSD offered very good performance throughout our testing. These drives are not meant to outpace all others in terms of large sequential transfers and our tests proved that, as the DC S3700s trailed the LSI SandForce-based drives in that regard. At high queue depths with smaller random data transfers, however, and in terms of consistency and latency, the Intel DC S3700 drivers were among the best performers overall. The DC SC3700 offered the lowest access times of all of the drives we tested and they finished at the top of the charts in the CrytalDiskMark 4K QD32 tests and in PCMark 7’s trace-based secondary storage benchmark. The Intel DC SC3700 also offered consistent performance, regardless of the compressibility of the data being transferred to or from the drive.

The Intel DC S3700 Solid State Drive

Intel’s enterprise-class solid state drives typically command a premium, and as you probably expect, the new DC S3700 series drives continue that trend. The 100GB variant carries an MSRP of $235, the 200GB drive $470, the 400GB drive $940, and the 800GB drive $1880. At those prices, the DC S3700 series drives cost $2.35 per gigabyte, which is more than double the price of most high-end consumer-class SSDs. These drives aren’t targeted at the same market though. Take a look as some other enterprise-class SSDs and you’ll see Intel’s DC S3700 is priced very competitively. In fact, in comparison to other enterprise-class drives like the Intel SSD 710 ($3.84 per GB), the Kingston SSDNow E100 ($4.29 per GB), or the OCZ Talos 2 R ($3.99 per GB), the Intel DC SC3700 is downright cheap.

We obviously can’t speak to the long-terms reliability of the Intel DC S3700, but Intel’s track record in the enterprise SSD market is excellent. These new drives stick with proven, mature 25nm HET-MLC NAND, they offer consistently strong performance, and their endurance rating is comfortably high at 10 full-drive writes per day for 5 years. Consider the Intel DC S3700’s overall performance profile, feature set, a 5-year warranty and competitive pricing, and Intel’s got another strong enterprise-class SSD in their product portfolio.

5-Year Warranty Consistent Performance Competitive Pricing High Endurance Rating	Relatively Expensive Sequential Transfers Trail many other SSDs.