Review Intel SSD 730 480GB

The champ is back. In the beginning, the landscape of consumer SSDs was wild, weird, and wondrous. The first solid-state drives used SLC NAND and made a mockery of hard drives’ performance. They also cost a mortgage payment or two. Even for power users, these early SSDs were the definition of a vanity buy, the teacup giraffe of PC components.

The days of Intel being the dominant player in the client SSD business are long gone. A few years ago Intel shifted its focus from the client SSDs to the more profitable and hence alluring enterprise market

Intel was one of the first manufacturers to bring balance to the Force, as it were. The X18-M and X25-M featured vastly more affordable MLC NAND and Intel’s homebrewed storage controller; these SSDs still outmatched hard drives in terms of performance, but it didn’t take a king’s ransom to retain their services.

Enthusiasts came out in droves to buy these SSDs. Intel used its own storage controllers for a few years before switching to third-party silicon. Well, now a few more years have passed, and if you’re still carrying a torch for an SSD controller that’s Intel born and bred, you’re in luck: The new SSD 730 drives are all Intel, through and through.

While the branding suggests that this is an enterprise drive like the SSD 710, Intel is marketing the SSD 730 directly to consumers and the DC S3xxx along with the 900 series remain as Intel's enterprise lineups

The SSD 730 series, formerly code- named “Jackson Ridge,” relies on Intel’s third-generation controller and 20nm NAND flash, but with a clever little twist. The SSD 730’s controller and NAND are both overclocked—from 400MHz to 600MHz in the case of the controller and from 83MHz to 100MHz for the NAND. Despite tinkering with the SSD’s clocks, Intel throws an impressive five- year warranty behind the SSD 730 Series. The drives’ write endurance, to 70GB of writes per day, jumps out as a spec for a drive that belongs in a server rack, not a power user’s gaming rig.

The 480GB SSD 730 that Intel sent us promises sequential reads and writes of 550MBps and 470MBps, respectively. Random reads and writes are mighty fine, too, pushing the needle up to 89,000 IOPS (read) and 74,000 IOPS (write). Better still, performance scales incredibly well when you stripe a pair of SSD 730s together, according to Intel.

Adopting the platform from the DC S3500/S3700, the SSD 730 is Intel's first fully
in-house designed client drive since the SSD 320

These claims, as it turned out, ain’t too far from the truth. Our benchmark results loudly declared what we suspected all along: Intel still knows how to make a damn good SSD. Welcome back, guys. We’ve missed you.