Despite optimisations such as wear levelling, longevity has been a major concern with SSD drives. However, if information leaked on Intel's upcoming 710 and 720 SSDs is to be believed, we may have a credible solution on our hands. These 2.5" drives will feature a 3 Gbps SATA interface and incorporate more durable multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash chips. The 710 series drives will sport a 25 nm MLC flash that will last for 500 TB worth of writes over the life cycle of a 100 GB drive. To put this into perspective, Intel's current 320 series SSDs are rated at only 15 TB for a 120 GB drive.
One of the reasons for such improved reliability figures of the prototype drives is a healthy over-provisioning of 20%. SSD over-provisioning is the inclusion of extra memory capacity that's inaccessible for user storage. This lets the drive replace bad memory blocks for longer life. The 710's specs include sustained read and writes speeds of 270 and 210 MB/s respectively. The drive is rated at 36,000 IOps in 4 KB random reads and and a mere 2,400 IOps for writes.
Unlike the 710, the 720 is designed with speed in mind. It runs on a much faster PCI Express interface and includes 512 MB of cache memory, which allows it to hit claimed read and write rates of 2,200 and 1,800 MB/s respectively. The IOps figures are similarly off the charts, with random 4 KB reads pegged at 180,000 IOps, while random writes are claimed to go up to 56,000 IOps. The 720 series drives feature more durable 34 nm Single Level Cell (SLC) flash memory modules that deliver 18 petabytes worth of writes over the lifespan of a 200 GB drive.
There's still no official word on these figures, but such rock-solid reliability will make the extra cost of SSD drives more palatable.
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