Recently there have been some rumors about new updated Intel DC P3000 series SSDs hitting the market soon. We finally have confirmation from a major networking/ compute OEM that this is the case. The two SSDs are focused on larger capacities and performance. The two confirmed SSDs are the Intel DC P3520 and DC P3608.
This slide summarizes the Intel DC P3520 series SSD. It is a NVMe PCIe 3.0 x4 drive that will utilized 3D NAND, similar to what Samsung has been using in its latest drives. Capacities will range from 1TB to 3.2TB and be available both in 2.5″ and AIC variants. Although writes per day are certainly still in the “read workload” family we have seen from other vendors, there are many applications that have mostly read workload patterns (e.g. web servers.) Also interesting is that while the DC P3500 series started at 400GB capacities, the starting capacity for the new DC P3520 series will be 2.5x that figure at 1TB.
We should start seeing the cards desgined into major OEM systems by the end of 2015.
Also in the release is the Intel DC P3608 series. The DC P3600 series has been very popular due to its 3 DWPD write capacity and lower costs than the DC P3700 series. We have even seen some OEM only variants like the Oracle Exadata Intel DC P3605 series where we have 2x 1.6TB drives from in the lab. The Intel DC P3608 series looks much like a dual drive in one PCIe slot solution, targeted at the standard x8 PCIe 3.0 slots we see in most servers.
These drives are already hitting the market but we look forward to getting one to see how Intel is handling two controllers. The idle power of 8-10w would be tough to achieve with a PCIe switch chip onboard.
