Intel has announced its newest DC P3608 series of enterprise PCIe solid state drives that should outperform the currently available P3600 series, by combining two PC3600 SSDs on a single expansion card with wider PCIe 3.0 x8 interface.

The new DC P3608 SSD is pretty much two P3600 NVMe SSDs connected via PLX switch and paired up with PCIe 3.0 x8 interface. While this will not double the performance of the DC P3600 SSD, due to the overhead of the PCIe PLX switch and two independent controllers, the performance is still quite impressive at up to 5000 MB/s for sequential read and 3000 MB/s for sequential write.

The random performance also got a significant boost to 850,000 IOPS for 4k random read. The random 4k write performance depends on the capacity so the 1.6TB version has 150,000 IOPS, 3.2TB has 80,000 IOPS and 4TB version has 50,000 IOPS random 4k write performance.

Pairing two SSD controllers and a PCIe switch on a single half-height half-length PCIe card significantly raised the power consumption to 11.5W, which means that the DC P3608 is impossible on a 2.5-inch form factor. The endurance rating is set at 3 DWPD and the entire series is backed by a 5-year warranty.

The Intel DC P3608 series has a suggested retail price of US $3,509 for the 1.6TB version, $7,009 for the 3.2TB, and US $8,759 for the top 4TB model.



Source: Intel.com.