Lenovo 4XB0K12345 Internal Solid State Drive Data Storage

The Intel S3610 Enterprise Mainstream SATA solid-state drives (SSDs) for System x are advanced data center SSDs optimized for mixed read-write performance, endurance and strong data protection. The drives are available in either 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch drive form factor.

The key difference between Enterprise Performance SSDs such as the S3710 SSDs, Enterprise Mainstream SSDs such as the S3610 SSDs, and Enterprise Entry SSDs, such as the S3510 SSDs, is their endurance (life expectancy). SSDs have a huge, but finite, number of program/erase (P/E) cycles, which determines how long the drives can perform write operations and thus their life expectancy. Enterprise Mainstream SSDs have better endurance than the Enterprise Entry SSDs, but at a higher cost/IOPS ratio.

SSD write endurance is typically measured by the number of program/erase cycles that the drive can incur over its lifetime, which is listed as TBW in the device specification. The TBW value that is assigned to a solid-state device is the total bytes of written data that a drive can be guaranteed to complete. Reaching this limit does not cause the drive to immediately fail; the TBW simply denotes the maximum number of writes that can be guaranteed.

A solid-state device does not fail upon reaching the specified TBW, but at some point after surpassing the TBW value (and based on manufacturing variance margins), the drive reaches the end-of-life point, at which time the drive goes into read-only mode. Because of such behavior, careful planning must be done to use SSDs in the application environments to ensure that the TBW of the drive is not exceeded before the required life expectancy.

For example, the Intel S3610 800GB Enterprise Mainstream SATA G3HS 2.5" SSD has an endurance of 5,300 TB (5.3 PB) of total bytes written (TBW) over five years. This means that for full operation over five years, write workload must be limited to no more than 2.4 TB of writes per day (the equivalent of 3 full drive writes per day). For the device to last in three years, the drive write workload must be limited to no more than 4.0 TB of writes per day.