The Lenovo Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) MLC Enterprise Value SSDs have the following features:

• 1.8-inch, 2.5-inch, and 3.5-inch industry standard form factors
• Support for a conventional 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch drive bay (2.5-inch or 3.5-inch SSDs, respectively) or eXFlash SSD drive bay or SSD drive bay on selected iDataPlex®, BladeCenter®, Flex System™, and NeXtScale System servers (1.8-inch drives)
• 6 Gbps SATA interface
• Use of industry-leading Micron 20 nm MLC NAND technology
• Cost-effective MLC NAND technology with high read and write performance:
  • Up to 65,000 read IOPS
  • Up to 35,000 write IOPS
  • Up to 425 MBps sequential read rate
  • Up to 375 MBps sequential write rate
• Enterprise Data Path Protection to ensure NAND integrity
• Static and dynamic wear leveling
• Endurance: up to 1.9 PB of total bytes written (TBW) for an 800 GB drive
• Support for MegaRAID CacheCade feature of a supported ServeRAID controller
• Energy-saving 6 watt typical power consumption per drive
• Absence of moving parts reduces potential failure points in the server
• Native command queuing support
• Self-monitoring, analysis, and reporting technology (SMART) command set

Enterprise Value SSDs and Enterprise SSDs have similar read and write IOPS performance, but the key difference between them is their endurance (or lifetime) (that is, how long they can perform write operations because SSDs have a finite number of program/erase (P/E) cycles). Enterprise Value SSDs have a better cost/IOPS ratio but lower endurance compared to Enterprise SSDs. SSD write endurance is typically measured by the number of program/erase (P/E) cycles that the drive incurs over its lifetime, listed as the total bytes of written data (TBW) in the device specification.

The TBW value assigned to a solid-state device is the total bytes of written data (based on the number of P/E cycles) that a drive can be guaranteed to complete (% of remaining P/E cycles = % of remaining TBW). Reaching this limit does not cause the drive to immediately fail. It simply denotes the maximum number of writes that can be guaranteed. A solid-state device will not fail upon reaching the specified TBW. At some point based on manufacturing variance margin, after surpassing the TBW value, the drive will reach the end-of-life point, at which the drive will go into a read-only mode.

Because of such behavior by Enterprise Value solid-state drives, careful planning must be done to use them only in read-intensive or mixed up to 70% read/30% write environments to ensure that the TBW of the drive will not be exceeded before the required life expectancy.

The Enterprise Value drives described here are capable of up to 1.9 PB (480 and 800 GB SSDs) of lifetime writes. For the 480 GB SSD to last five years inside of the 1.9 PB of TBW, the drive write workload must be limited to no more than 1,040 GB of writes per day, which is equivalent to about 2.2 full drive writes per day. For the device to last three years, the drive write workload must be limited to no more than 1,735 GB of writes per day (or 3.6 full drive writes per day).

* 4 KB block transfers