Integral SVR-PRO 100 SRI 4TB SSD Review

Novachips HLNAND technology shows that 3D NAND isn't the only way to produce large capacity SSD's in the standard 2.5in format. This is good news for the market in general, as with more competition in the very large capacity SSD market segment should come much more competitive pricing than there is at the moment.

Novachips claim that the new technology offers superior scalability, reliability and performance over conventional NAND flash drives and certainly the ‘Ring' architecture it uses offers the potential for some truly colossal drives. Integral are certainly not pussy footing around with the technology either, offering 4TB and 8TB drives straight off the bat which gives an inkling of what's possible with the technology.

Performance-wise the 4TB SVR-PRO 100 SRI has quoted Sequential read/write figures of up to 551MB/s and 517MB/s respectively, figures we could confirm using the ATTO benchmark – the tested drive producing figures of 552MB/s for reads and 519MB/s for writes. Tested 4K random performance was a mixed bag with reads matching the official figure of 52,000 IOPS at 52,215 IOPS while at 64,479 IOPS the write performance fell short of the official 77,000 IOPS.

The drive didn't perform too well in the CrystalDiskMark 4K QD32 or AS SSD benchmarks. However, at deeper queue depths (QD32 and upwards) the drive performed well in both read and write tests and at a queue depth of 256 gave a performance stability rating of 94%, which is very good indeed. It also excelled when tested with some read intensive IOMeter tests, pretty much justifying its ‘Read Intensive' label.

The drive offers great endurance at 1000TBW but to show just how durable HLNAND can be, Integral offer high endurance HLNAND drives, the SVR-PRO 200 SMW range, whose flagship 6.4TB drive comes with an insane rating of 11680TBW.

Strangely for a drive that could easily find itself in a data center environment, there is no mention in the spec sheet for the drive about any security features. The Novachips NVS3800-39 controller does though support AES 128/256 bit and XTS-AES encryption as well as TCG Opal 2.0. What is provided however is hardware power protection in the shape of three power capacitors soldered on the drives PCB.

We found the 4TB Integral SVR-PRO 100 SRI on the Insight website for £1,615.19 (inc VAT) HERE

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Pros

• Huge capacity.
• Endurance.
• Stability at deep queue depths.

Cons

• Pricey.
• Didn't perform so well in some of the benchmarks.

Kitguru says: It might not be the fastest SSD we've laid hands on but it certainly is one of the biggest and offers a glimpse of what's possible without resorting to 3D NAND.

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