Intel SSD 545s Review

[CRamseyer]

The ARK has a history of showing the wrong endurance info until someone goes in and fixes it. We had the review finished at noon the day before launch. I had kids bball camp transportation duty this week and was up at 6 AM each day. At 12:06 AM Intel sent revised endurance numbers but I was asleep when they arrived. The review went live at 12:30 when the NDA lifted.

The revised specification list says the 545s Series endurance for the 512GB drive is 288 TBW.

On the call with Intel they stated the endurance was 100 TBW and we published that number first. The next morning we revised it with what we think is the correct rating, 288 TBW.

That's 72 TBW for every 128GB. Apparently that's an important number. We spoke with another fab a few days before and learned that's the number OEMs require, 72TBW for every 128GB. I think we'll see this endurance rating used as a blanket for many new drives going forward.

 

[logainofhades]

I would still choose a crucial MX300, over this one. A bit more storage, and $20 cheaper, right now on newegg. Even Intel's 600p is a few bucks cheaper right now.

 

[jimmysmitty]

If what matters is endurance then Intel is one of the best, especially since their 3D NAND is no longer going to the smaller nm which causes endurance loss compared to previous versions.

Why are you talking in generalities?

The spec is 144 TBW, for this drive (not sure why the article says 288, currently).

http://ark.intel.com/products/125019/Intel-SSD-545s-Series-512GB-2_5in-SATA-6Gbs-3D2-TLC

Endurance is also a function of over-provisioning, block size, amount of embedded DRAM & SLC for write buffering, and how conservative they choose to be, when estimating the typical workload.

I am not. Intels NAND will have higher endurance for the NAND cells since it is not as small of a process size. It has been proven that smaller NAND size means lower endurance to read/writes.

Yes there are other factors that can add to or improve endurance but from a purely objective viewpoint Intels SSDs tend to have one of the best endurance ratings.

 

[bit_user]

from a purely objective viewpoint Intels SSDs tend to have one of the best endurance ratings.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but what evidence do you have of that? For our education.

 

[alextheblue]

You need to account for price per GB, though.

Bit, the Evo is comparable in price, while remaining superior in performance and reliability - even after all this time. Intel should feel embarrassed, their R&D budget is truly massive and yet they're using weak third party controllers. Custom firmware alone obviously isn't cutting it. I was really hoping the outcome of this review would be a SATA drive that dethroned the Evo, finally. A lot of old systems just need a good SSD to bring them alive again.

On a separate note the highest capacity the Samsung 960 Pro comes in is 2 terabytes meaning that with 3 M.2 ports the most capacity your computer could have would be 6 terabytes in a raid 0, with close to 10 gigabytes a second of theoretical read throughput which is ... impressive.
Edit: I believe 3 M.2 is the highest I have seen on any motherboard so far, correct me if I'm wrong.

On the other hand the size of the 850 Evos go up to 4 terabytes and you aren't limited to 3.

So SATA does have at least one advantage over NVME/M.2 if you were trying to store more than 6 terabytes of data.

Does said board have full X4 PCIe 3.0 on all three M.2 ports, no shared lanes? Anyway yes, even with M.2, SATA still has a place for cheaper secondary storage (future high-capacity HDD replacements), as well as older systems.

 

[derekullo]

With Ryzen/Thread ripper, 64 lanes, and the i9 series, 44 lanes, you should have enough lanes for ports not to share bandwidth.

A x4 pci-e gets 4 lanes so the manufacturer would have to reserve 12 lanes for your 3 - m.2 drives for full speed.

Although all this depends on what the manufacturer decides.