Stefan Mileschin

Late last week Intel updated its enterprise SATA SSD lineup with the 'Data Center' DC S3610 and DC S3710. At the time of the announcement the details of what exactly had changed were rather scarce, but I just got off of the phone with Intel and have a better understanding of the announcement.

The S3610 and S3710 are based on Intel's second generation SATA 6Gbps controller, which was first introduced in the high capacity (1.2TB & 1.6TB) and M.2 S3500 models a couple of months ago. Intel is keeping the specifics of the controller close to its chest and the only tidbit of info I was able to get out of Intel is that the new controller runs at a higher frequency, although Intel wouldn't disclose the exact speed (for the record, the first generation controller runs at 400MHz in the S3500/S3700). My guess would be that the second generation controller is merely a die shrink with the architecture being very similar, which would allow a higher frequency without impacting the power consumption. I'm also thinking that the internal caches and the DRAM controller have been upgraded to enable the higher capacities.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8954/i...nterprise-ssds