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One of bright dots in the otherwise boring Computex 2015 landscape was a small Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) storage event focused on their next generation SSDs. As Intel brought the 750 SSD series, with its terabyte-class capacity and PCIe interface options, to the high end PC world. And, you can choose the formats – either the classic 2.5 inch drive with a new connector, or a simple low profile PCIe x4 card, nice for those unused PCIe expansion slots on your mainboard.
The 750 series brings some of the good performance and reliability stuff from Intel’s similar enterprise SSD P3x00 series, including over 2 GB/s read performance, top notch write reliability and extremely low latency through NVMe. Yet, there is something else really lovely for those wanting ultimate storage performance, but not having to pay top dollar for it – a simple compact PCIe x16 card containing 4 interfaces for these PCIe x4 drives. Put four of them on it, and say run RAID 10 on them, and watch how your read performance approaches 10 GB/s – yes, ten gigabytes per second!
Intel’s SSD honcho, Rob Crooke, said they are very satisfied with their SSD life performance, and even a consumer SSD drive can last longer than five years even in very write-intensive scenarios. With 3-D cell packing and newer processes, we will see SSD reach terabyte even in the M.2 compact factor about a year from now – remember, that is combined with PCIe x4 performance even in that compact format. On the performance front, Intel hinted at single-slot PCIe x8 SSD drives for both enterprise and consumer markets over the next year, and practically total elimination of need for hard disk drives even in budget PCs as the per-GB price tumbles to tens of cents.
In summary, good stuff for the high end and mainstream PC users alike – watch for our review of some of these soon!
