Intel SSD DC P4510 8TB review

Designed to support a broad range of cloud workloads, Intel's DC P4510 builds on the success of the previous generation DC P4500 family of drives and introduces Intel's 64-layer TLC NAND to the enterprise segment enabling greater Quality Of Service (QoS) bandwidth and performance in the data centre environment.

The previous P4500 model came in three form factors depending on capacity; standard 2.5in 15mm U.2, HHHL Add In Card and EDSFF (Intel's Ruler concept). Currently (at the time of writing) the P4510 is only available as a 2.5in 15mm U.2 drive.

The new drives have enhanced SMART monitoring and a power loss imminent (PLI) protection scheme that guards against power loss if the system power is suddenly lost. The DC P4510 also supports a built in AES-XTS 256-bit encryption engine and TCG Opal 2.0.

Intel state official Sequential read/write figures for the 8TB drive as up to 3,200MB/s and 3,000MB/s respectively. Using our sustained Sequential test we could confirm and indeed better those figures with a read result of 3,593.71MB/s and 3,415.54MB/s for writes.

Official 4K Random Read/Write figures for the drive are up to 620,000 IOPS for reads and up to 139,000 IOPS for writes. Under our 4K Random read/write tests we couldn't get close to that maximum figure for reads with a peak IOPS score of 538,732 IOPS. However when it came to writes the tested drive gave a figure which eclipsed the official figure producing a peak figure of 448,711 IOPS. Tested with a 8KB data block the drive produced a peak read figure of 427,053 IOPS for reads and 398,292 IOPS for writes.

In our long term performance stability test, the drive averaged 196,503 IOPS but more importantly it achieved a performance stability of 98.52%, which is what you would expect from a drive aimed at the market segment the DC P4510 is aimed at.

The flagship 8TB DC P4510 comes with a hefty price tag but breaking it down to a very basic simple £/GB figure it works out at around 0.61p/GB which works out to be cheaper than the 4TB flagship 2.5in drive of the previous generation P4500 line-up at 0.63p/GB.

We found the 8TB Intel SSD DC P4510 on Span.co.uk for £2,168 HERE (updated April 2019).

Pros

• Overall Performance.
• 5 year warranty.
• Improved QoS.

Cons

• Couldn't match the official 4K Random Read IOPS figure under testing.

Kitguru says: The DC P4510 brings Intel's 64-layer TLC NAND to the enterprise segment allowing for larger capacities, improved performance and Quality Of Service, which in turn brings improved service levels in data centres.

Become a Patron!