IBM 480GB SATA 2.5″ S3500 MLC HS

Introduction

The S3500 SATA MLC Enterprise Value solid-state drives (SSDs) for System x® employ MLC NAND flash memory and a 6 Gbps SATA interface to provide an affordable solution with industry leading performance. They are targeted at workloads that require high I/O performance in random read operations, including content delivery, streaming video, and big data analytics.

Figure 1 shows the S3500 SATA 2.5-inch MLC Enterprise Value SSD.

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Unlike client solid-state drives, S3500 SATA MLC Enterprise Value SSDs are designed to operate 24 hours per day, 7 days per week (24×7), and they are equipped with a robust suite of enterprise features, including SMART attributes, hot-plug support, high reliability, enhanced ruggedness, thermal throttling, and enhanced power loss protection. They also leverage full end-to-end data path protection to protect the integrity of the data that is transferred to and from the NAND flash memory or stored in the memory.

S3500 SATA MLC Enterprise Value SSDs provide outstanding IOPS/watt and cost/IOPS for for read-intensive enterprise applications like web serving, content delivery, streaming video, and big data.

Rigorous testing of S3500 SATA MLC Enterprise Value SSDs by Lenovo through the ServerProven® program assures a high degree of confidence in storage subsystem compatibility and reliability. Providing an additional peace of mind, these drives are covered under Lenovo warranty.

Part number information

Table 1 lists the information for ordering part numbers and feature codes.

Table 1. Ordering part numbers and feature codes

 This SSD can be a hot-swap or non-hot-swap drive depending on the server in which it is installed.

The part numbers include the following items:

• One SSD without a drive tray (1.8-inch SSDs) or one SSD with a 2.5-inch hot-swap or simple-swap drive tray (2.5-inch SSDs) or one SSD with a 3.5-inch hot-swap drive tray (3.5-inch SSDs)
• Support Flyer for SSD
• Warranty Flyer
• Important Notices document

Features

The S3500 SATA MLC Enterprise Value SDDs have the following features:

• Industry standard 1.8-inch, 2.5-inch, or 3.5-inch form factors
• Support for a conventional 2.5-inch drive bay (2.5-inch SSDs), 3.5-inch drive bay (3.5-inch SSDs), eXFlash drive bay (1.8-inch SSDs), or SSD drive bay (1.8-inch SSDs) on selected System x, iDataPlex®, BladeCenter®, and Flex System™ servers
• Cost-effective Intel 20 nm MLC NAND flash memory
• SATA MLC solid-state drive with high read performance and consistently low latencies to fulfill client needs in the enterprise space
• High reliability and enhanced ruggedness
• Energy saving, with as little as 5 W power consumption per drive
• Absence of moving parts to reduce potential failure points in the server
• S.M.A.R.T. support
• Advanced Encrypting Standard (AES) 256-bit encryption
• Full end-to-end data path protection
• Thermal throttling to extend the life of the drive
• Enhanced power loss data protection

Enterprise Value SSDs and Enterprise SSDs have similar read IOPS performance, but the key differences between them is their endurance (or life expectancy) and write IOPS performance. SSDs have a huge but finite number of program/erase (P/E) cycles, which affect how long they can perform write operations and thus their life expectancy. Enterprise Value SSDs have a better cost per read IOPS ratio but lower endurance and write IOPS performance compared to Enterprise SSDs. 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, for the S3500 240GB SATA 2.5-inch MLC Enterprise Value SSD to last in five years inside of the 140 TB of TBW, the drive write workload must be limited to no more than 77 GB of writes per day. For the device to last in three years, the drive write workload must be limited to no more than 128 GB of writes per day.

Technical specifications