Intel has released a dizzying array of solid state storage products over the last few weeks. We recently took a look at a pair of
Intel Optane SSD 800P series drives for enthusiast desktop and mobile systems, and also tinkered with the impressive
Intel SSD DC P4600 series enterprise-class NVMe drive. Today, we’ll stay in the enterprise space and inspect a pair of Intel’s recently-announced SSD DC P4510 series drives, which target cloud storage applications with impressive throughput and latency characteristics.
The Intel SSD DC P4510 series is an evolution of the existing SSD DC P4500, but feature some newer technologies and highly-optimized and re-tooled firmware to boost performance and minimize latency with the 64-layer TLC 3D NAND at the heart of the drives. Take a look at the
Intel SSD DC P4510 series’ high-level features and specification below and then we’ll dig in a little deeper, see what makes these drives tick, and evaluate performance with a variety of benchmarks...
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| Intel SSD DC P4510 Series |
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Specifications & Features
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The Intel SSD DC P4510 series drives we’ll be showing you here leverage the U.2 2.5” x 15mm form factor and will be offered in capacities ranging from 1TB all the way on up to 8TB – we’ve got 2TB and 8TB drive on tap for you here. In addition to the U.2 form factor, these drives will also be offered in the EDSFF 1U Long “ruler” and 1U short form factors at some point later in the year.
At the core of these drives is the same Intel-built controller that powers the existing SSD DC P4500 series drives, but it is paired to newer,
64-layer TLC 3D NAND and freshly-tuned and optimized firmware to provide improved latency and throughout, while improving consistency and QoS as well.
Moving to the newer 64-layer 3D TLC NAND flash memory on these drives not only allows Intel to provide higher capacities to ultimately improve the maximum storage density per server, but it also reduces power consumption as well; peak power under load is 16 watts with these drives.
Inside the chassis there are actually a pair of PCBs linked together with a rigid “ribbon”. One PCB houses the controller, some DRAM, flash, and capacitors that offer some measure of power-loss protection, and the other PCB is crammed full of additional flash memory of varying amounts depending on the capacity of the drive. Like Intel’s other data-center
SSDs, these drives offer end-to-end protections from silent data corruption and include 5-year warranties. Endurance is rated for 1 full drive write per day.
In terms of throughput, the max capacity 8TB SSD DC P4510 is rated for 3.2GB/s reads with 3GB/s writes. As you’ll see a little later, the drive is absolutely capable of hitting these speeds. The lower capacities offer similar read speeds, but writes aren’t quite as fast. Random 4K read/write IOPs are also relatively high at ratings of 637K/139K.
