DELL Storage SC4020 800GB Tier 1 SSD

We are pleased to announce the availability of a new drive – 800GB Tier 1 (Mixed Use) SSD – the first of its kind in an SC system. This drive type is to be used as a Tier 1 SSD similar to the existing 200GB/400GB write intensive (WI) drives. The SCOS will identify this drive with the same WI classification and will use the same tier as the 200GB and 400GB WI SSDs.  The industry is referring to these drives types as “mixed use (MU)” drives but from a Dell Storage perspective, these are used and tiered the same way as the Write Intensive (WI) SSDs.

Dell Storage is shifting to mixed use drives for a number of reasons:

1.       As new generations of SSDs are released, WI and MU drives will offer similar write performance.

2.      As capacity grows, MU drives offer similar endurance as the smaller WI drives when comparing total petabytes written in the drive’s life. 

3.      Field and customer data has helped determine that MU drives offer sufficient write endurance for even the most write intensive environments. 

4.      Mixed use drives offer higher capacity at a lower $/GB than comparable WI drives.

5.      The broader SSD market is making a shift to MU drives.

Table 1: Comparison of WI/MU/RI Drives for Dell Compellent

Dell Storage Use	Write Intensive		Read Intensive
Market Terminology	Write Intensive (WI)	Mixed Use (MU)	Read Intensive (RI)
Workload	Mainstream Applications Any usage		Mostly Read 90/10 R/W Mix
Used with Compellent	Yes		Yes
Capacities	200/400 GB	800GB	1.6 TB
Endurance (Full writes / Day)*	10-30		<3
Endurance (written PBs)*	Up to 30PB		8PB
Random Read IOPS*	Up to 20K +		14K +
Random Write IOPS*	11K +	8K +	4K +
Sustained Write Bandwidth*	200-250 MB/s	150-225 MB/s	50-100 MB/s
List $/GB	Up to $31	$16.60	$5.25

* These performance values are for individual drives during benchmark testing. These values do not reflect actual system performance values. Values are expected to differ once drives are managed in the system with RAID virtualization and other system functions.

It is important to note that we recently moved to a new warranty policy that protects SSDs in Compellent Systems for the full length of a system’s warranty, regardless of wear or maximum rated life.