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Intel SSD 600p Series mainstream M.2 PCIe SSDs announced

by Mark Tyson on 26 August 2016, 10:01

Tags: Intel (NASDAQ:INTC)

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qac56w

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Intel has announced a whole host of new SSDs. All of them use the latest 3D TLC (Tri-level cell) NAND from Micron. To address various market segments Intel has new products for mainstream consumers – the SSD 600p Series, businesses and professionals – the SSD Pro 6000p Series, Data Centre – the SSD DC P3520 Series and SSD DC S3520 Series, and for IoT – the SSD E 6000p Series and SSD E 5420s Series. It is the consumer targeted Intel SSD 600p Series storage that we will focus on in the following news report.

The new Intel SSD 600p Series proudly boasts that it is bringing PCIe to the mainstream. These drives make use of the increasingly popular M.2 form factor with PCIe Gen 3 x4 NVMe interface. Intel promises that the SSD 600p Series will "take PCs to a new level of responsiveness," offering performance about 3x faster than a SATA SSD but with similar pricing (to high-end SATA SSDs).

For a brief rundown of the drives in the range and their suggested pricing in US dollars check out the chart below:

Capacity

Sequential
read (MB/s)

Sequential
write (MB/s)

Random
read (IOPS)

Random
write (IOPS)

Suggested
USD price

128 GB

770

450

35,000

91,000

$69.00

256GB

1570

540

71,000

112,000

$104.00

512GB

1775

560

128,500

128,000

$189.00

1024GB

1800

560

155,000

128,000

$359.00

 

The lowest capacity drive offers a cost per gigabyte of 53 cents while the largest drive brings this value metric down to 35 cents. Other key specifications of these above SSDs are; a life expectancy of 1.6 million hours (MTBF) backed by an Intel 5 year warranty, they are 80mm long and 1.5mm thick (single sided designs), weigh 40g, and consume 100mW of power when active, 40mW when idle, and 5mW when in sleep state.

Intel's SSD Pro 6000p Series offer the same headline sizes, read/write, and IOPS performance figures as the SSD 600p Series but are priced an extra $10 at each capacity. The only difference seems to be some different firmware / software to specifically support client and workstation management, and features such as Intel Remote Secure Erase.

Most of the above products become available starting from next week but the 1TB drives arrive later, in Q4 this year.



HEXUS Forums :: 3 Comments

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Why no comment in the article on the comparatively low sequential write numbers? And why on earth are they bothering with a 128GB model?
The 256Gb, and up, models seem like a good dollar vs performance value option with good IOP's on the 512GB and up, definitely a lot faster sequential read speeds than SATA variants.
But wonder why the sequential write speeds are so slow (relatively speaking).
I suppose it may be because the average mainstream user will not be doing a lot of write intensive actions, so they focused more on getting good read speeds (eg - at about 3 times the speed of a average SATA M.2, it means even faster boot times) to keep the price lower, plus the performance user will be looking more at higher spec, more expensive models anyway.
Though I am not to sure about the 128GB version - it's read speed drops dramatically when compared to the others - overall it's performance does not look that much different compared to standard SATA models.
Wonder how hot these get when worked hard, maybe that has something to do with the specs.
I am no expert on these (I have a now old Samsung xp941 512GB with heatsinks and a tiny fan mounted on it to help stop it from overheating and throttling), but that is how I see it.
Its easy why they sell 128 Gb ssd's think about small laptops and nuc's, bricks
Why would anyone need larger drives on those, 128 Gb is enough to run the the os and some applications one needs. More is overkill and nonsense. The fact that they are slower is also normal, any ssd gets faster when they have more storage chips connected to the controller. These days storage chips are often 1 size fits them all, thats why you hardly see smaller ones these days 128,256,512 and upwards. Each step up is another chip added to the controller, history learns the more chips the controller has to write the data the faster it will be stored. Its more complicated but this gives you an idea why the larger are faster. Why the sequential writes are so much slower is beyond me, however i am glad that intel is bringing some competition on the market. But they have to matchup a bit more to get people to buy them. Because most competition drives have minimal double the sequential write speeds of these.