Intel SSD DC P3608 1.6TB PCIe SSD Review
Final Thoughts & Conclusions
The Intel SSD DC P3608 Series 1.6TB drive laid down some very impressive performance numbers and shows that this NVMe drive really does need the PCIe Gen 3 x8 interface as it topped 5,500 MB/s sequential write speeds and 2,000 MB/s sequential write speeds. The tests that we ran on this drive were the ones we typically run on consumer SSD’s to give our readers a look at the level of performance that Intel is now able to get from a single Data Center drive. We’ll be tinkering around with some enterprise benchmark tests behind the scenes and hope to look at this drive again in the future when we get things figured out. The architecture of this SSD is really interesting as it looks like one drive and fits in a single PCIe x8 slot, but it has two NVMe controllers to optimize performance. The two controllers an simultaneously process commands with separate queues across the controllers for them to get the most even IO distribution across the processor cores. So, you can run the controllers separately for low queue depth needs or you can use Intel RST 4.3 driver to aggregate the two controllers together to run RAID to maximize performance. Splitting up the database IO queues for example will half the latency, so this is great for applications where you need to keep the applications latency low. This is Intel’s first NVMe RAID software stack and they are very excited about the possibilities of how people will use this drive!
When it comes to pricing the you are looking at $3,509 for the 1.6TB drive, $7,009 for the 3.2TB drive and $8,759 for the 4TB drive. Those prices are well beyond what most enthusiasts are willing to spend on an entire system let alone a single drive, so this product is clearly aimed at the high performance computing market where you have a data center, decent sized budgets and the need for a drive like this to speed the workloads being run up. You also won’t find another NVMe drive in the $2.19 per GB price range that offers this level of performance with power loss protection and end to end data protection!
The Intel SSD DC P3608 Series 1.6TB drive that we looked at today was the fastest SSD that we have ever tested and it is also the fastest drive in the Intel SSD Data Center family. The drive is shipping in volume today and it should be available to the public today!
Legit Bottom Line: The Intel SSD DC P3608 Series 1.6TB drive is the fastest SSD that we have tested to date!