Intel DC P3320 NVMe SSDs Axed?

In March 2016 Intel briefed media outlets including STH on a new NVMe SSD line, the Intel DC P3320 series. The goals of the Intel DC P3320 series were clear: transition to 3D NAND and get cost competitive with SATA. Given Intel’s aggressive positioning of the Intel DC P3520 SSD’s there may be little need for the DC P3320 series. At Dell EMC World the DC P3320 is conspicuously absent. We asked and it seems like the Intel DC P3320 is not coming soon.

This is somewhat to be expected. We reported recently that NVMe SSD pricing was already falling below SATA pricing. With the Intel DC P3520 series of NVMe SSDs becoming more price competitive and the Intel DC P3600’s also competitive with their SATA counterparts, the lower cost Intel DC P3320 reaching parity with the Intel DC S3510 is less appealing.

From the testing we conducted on Intel DC P3320 SSDs in the lab, they were highly read-optimized SSDs and after about 30 minutes of sustained writes they slowed down considerably.

Based on discussions with the teams here, the Intel DC P3520 has essentially become the value optimized segment offering from Intel. One of the companies using our DemoEval service is using DC P3520 NVMe SSDs in their Hadoop and big data analytics appliances where read performance and low latency are primary performance needs.

Over four months after their paper release, the Intel DC P3320 is still not even found on Intel ARK whereas the P3520 is easy to search for. As buyers of these drives, we ended up getting more performance at similar pricing which is a welcome upgrade. We expect that the next major upgrade from Intel will be a new controller design to address the company’s current 2TB capacity limitation.