As noted by an earlier poster in this thread, Intel does not claim full power-loss protection as a feature for this drive in any of their marketing materials or support documents.
When I queried Intel on the matter, the reply I received stated, “As per our website, Power Loss Data Protection has not been implemented for this SSD family.”
I also asked why, if the feature was not present, Intel has not done anything to dissuade the widespread belief propagated by the online review community that it is. I mentioned that some reviewers even stated Intel represented this as a feature of the product family. The Tech Report, for example, unequivocally states: “According to Intel, the power-loss protection is identical to that of its datacenter drives.” Intel declined to answer this part of the question.
It is interesting to note that all of the review units appear to have been engineering samples, so I suppose it is possible Intel decided to cut this feature prior to going to production. Intel loves to segment their product offerings, and perhaps they were concerned this feature would cut into the more margin-rich DC S3500/S3700 product families.
Has anyone with a production 730 SSD actually looked at the PCB to see if the capacitors are still present like they were on the engineering review samples? I would pop mine open, but I am hesitant to unseal the drive and am now contemplating returning it. It was intended to be a massively over-provisioned ZIL on my ZFS file server, but now I am having second thoughts.
