14 DAY TRIAL // We used to think that 1.8 GB/s was a huge speed for solid-state drives, no matter the form factor, but Intel decided to really shatter our world view by unveiling a series of SSDs with up to 2.8 GB/s transfer rate.
The 2 GB/s threshold was broken before, but not so brazenly. Sure, it will take a lot of cash to buy even one of these new monsters, but that's expected from data center customers anyway.
There are actually two new Intel SSD series: the Intel Solid-State Drive DC P3700 and Intel Solid-State Drive DC P3600.
There isn't any difference between the two, save for the type of NAND chips used, although this does affect the performance a bit.
You see, the DC P3700 are made from Intel's newest 20nm NAND Flash, while the others are simply not (they're limited to 2.6 GB/s by the way, speed-wise).
As you might have guessed, 2.8 GB/s and 2.6 GB/s are only the top read speed. Writing happens at a significantly slower rate.
They're still blazingly fast though, at 1.9 GB/s and 1.7 GB/s, respectively. For comparison, SATA drives don't go higher than 560 MB/s read and 550 MB/s write.
The New PCI Express controller featuring NVM3 technology is responsible for this data throughput. NVMe eliminates most of the latency caused by HDD interfaces.
Read and write still depend on capacity though. And while the 2 TB storage space is a big part of what makes the new Intel SSDs so surprising, that's just the top limit (for now).
There are three other levels, in both the DC P3700 and DC P3600: 1.6 TB, 800 GB and 400 GB (P3600 should also come in 1.2 TB though).
Intel designed the Intel Solid State Drive Data Center Family for PCIe while thinking of data center operations. The SSD DC P3700 Series is good for write-intensive workloads, while the Intel SSD DC P3500 Series is supposed to do fine in mixed ones.
Due to the less impressive NAND manufacturing technology used in the P3600, the endurance rating is of only 10.95 Petabytes Written instead of 36.5 PBW (10 drive writes per day versus 3).
There's a third line of SSDs, called Intel Solid-State Drive DC P3500, which has only 0.3 drive writes per day and is best in read-intensive workloads.
All three product lines should ship in 2.5-inch form factor, besides just PCI Express. Prices start at $560 / €560 and just go up from there.
