Intel Announces SSD DC P3608 Series

[HKZeroFive]

Intel is introducing a new family of enterprise PCIe SSDs with the aim of outperforming their existing DC P3600 series and even beating the DC P3700 series in many metrics. To do this, they've essentially put two P3600 SSDs on to one expansion card and widened the interface to 8 lanes of PCIe 3.0. While this does come across as a bit of a quick and dirty solution, it is a very straightforward way for Intel to deliver higher performance, albeit at the cost of sharply increased power consumption.

The SSD DC P3608 appears to the system as two individual NVMe drives behind a PLX PCIe switch chip. This means that extracting full performance from this card will require software RAID-0 or some similar software load-balancing solution. A new version of Intel's Rapid Storage Toolkit for Enterprise (RSTe) drivers will be providing this capability. The overhead of the PCIe switch and managing two independent controllers means that the P3608 cannot attain an oughtright doubling of the P3600's performance.

The inclusion of two SSD controllers and a PCIe switch chip also drives idle power consumption up to 11.5W and makes a 2.5" form factor impossible, so the P3608 series will only be available as a half-height half-length PCIe expansion card. Intel's not too worried about the form factor constraint, because they're now able to make full use of the 8-lane PCIe slots that are the most common in the sort of servers these drives are typically used in.

The SSD DC P3608 is available in three capacities, with the smallest 1.6TB configuration having more overprovisioning to boost random write speeds. Active power consumption varies with capacity, but all models support a power governor setting to limit power consumption to 35W or 25W instead of the worst-case 40W.

The article doesn't mention the other two capacities - there is a 3.2TB variant with the largest capacity being the 4TB variant. Thought-wise, I think it's good for Intel to keep busting out their SSDs, but in no way am I able to afford them at such a premium price. Larger capacities of SSDs have been said to come out in the next few years, and I hope to grab at least one. I think these SSDs give us a good indicator of what may come out in the future. It's just a matter of waiting.

Sauce: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9646/intel-announces-ssd-dc-p3608-series

There's also a review by The SSD Review here: http://www.thessdreview.com/our-reviews/intel-ssd-dc-p3608-review-1-6tb-over-5gbs-and-850k-iops/

[GlassBomb]

I think it's good for Intel to keep busting out their SSDs, but in no way am I able to afford them at such a premium price.

 

These are enterprise hardware, enterprise will always be super expensive. Why? Because it is meant to work 100% of the time, 24/7.

 

And holy macaroni. Look at those reads and writes.

[Pugs501]

These are enterprise hardware, enterprise will always be super expensive. Why? Because it is meant to work 100% of the time, 24/7.

 

And holy macaroni. Look at those reads and writes.

Well then...

[GlassBomb]

Well then...

 

Everything about these drives are through the roof. The P3700 1.6TB model has an endurance rating of 15 DWPD (Diskfull Writes Per Day). In other words, its warranty is good for 15 full rewrites every day, for 5 years straight. Not to mention the IOPS that's just as crazy on every drive.

[Sephiroth]

Man if only I had an extra $8k laying around I didn't need or know what to do with

[zacRupnow]

Black PCB. 

Get with the fucking program Intel.

[landon418]

Black PCB. 

Get with the fucking program Intel.

 

Doesn't matter, like said above, it's enterprise grade.

[TheAmazingCookieFromSquare]

Doesn't matter, like said above, it's enterprise grade.

Aesthetics still do matter no matter what

[CatCloud]

Price on that 1.6 TB?

[HKZeroFive]

Price on that 1.6 TB?

According to the 1.6 TB review in the OP, only a mere $3000

[zacRupnow]

Doesn't matter, like said above, it's enterprise grade.

Eh, Enterprise can have nice looking hardware too.

 

Btw you might want to edit the reply, deleting or hiding (use

content

with a / between the [ and s of the 2nd bock) pictures in quotes just keeps the thread clean.

[CatCloud]

According to the 1.6 TB review in the OP, only a mere $3000

That's a steal! Such bargain! Very wow.

[cesrai]

Aesthetics still do matter no matter what

ًWhy ? it's going to inside a freaking case and it won't see the light again.

[Vanderburg]

This drive makes my pants feel tighter, somehow.

[LucidMew]

So, the trend seems to be to throw more and more stuff in an SSD to make it go faster. The question I have is how long until we're going to need to plug in a PCI-e 6 or 8 pin power adapter into the SSD, just like a graphics card. Then we'd need some beastly cooling on it too.

[X1XNobleX1X]

I'll buy 4 and raid 0 them then.