Intel's most powerful SSD line yet
The key to offering increasingly fast solid state drive options has been tapping into the power of the NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) interface. Samsung did it with its gum-stick sized 950 Pro SSDs announced yesterday, and Intel continues to do it, this time with its new DC P3608 Series.
These drives are intended for data centers. They're also the fastest SSDs Intel has released to date -- when paired with multi-core Xeon processors, Intel says the unique NVMe dual controller architecture on this line allows them to evenly distribute I/O across the PCI-Express 3.0 x8 link to obtain real-world transfers topping 5,000MB per second, along with up to 850,000 random read IOPS.
Write speeds aren't quite as fast, though at up to 2,600MB/s, they're nothing to scoff at. Here's a look at how performance breaks down for each of the 1.6TB, 3.2TB, and 4TB drive options:
Since the new drives are intended for data centers, they're only available in the half-height, half-length, low-profile add-in card form factor, which is common in the industry. And at these capacities, it also allows Intel to offer twice the storage in the same physical volume versus its DC P3600 Series.
Intel envisions its new SSDs finding a home in some of the world's largest supercomputers where they can provide real-time analytics and High Performance Computing (HPC) chores. In terms of the latter, Intel says a single node can achieve up to 6GB/s of burst write performance when using two DC P3608 Series SSDs.
The buzzkill for home consumers is that these drives aren't destined for gaming machines. However, they do show where the market is headed, which is pretty exciting -- we've come a long way since complaining about storage being the bottleneck of system performance.
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