PCI Express-based SSDs are nothing new. OCZ and Fusion-io have been pumping them out for years. The interface facilitates freedom from the physical and architectural limitations of SATA. In the past, though, PCIe SSDs were simply SATA-attached drives glued together with an HBA on a single add-in card. There were notable exceptions, such as Micron's P320h and P420m, which used a native PCIe-to-NAND controller. But most were just brute force attempts at higher performance. Even previous Intel products like the SSD 910 were a group of solid-state devices connected to Hitachi SAS adapters.
Clearly, they employed a form factor different from the rotating hard drives we're accustomed to reviewing. But architecturally, PCIe-attached SSDs were still familiar. Some boasted ridiculously fast performance, but they always felt like niche products. There was no one standard binding them together, giving the product class legitimacy.
With the introduction of NVM Express, an official interface specification for accessing solid-state storage through PCI Express, manufacturers now have a set of guidelines that not only releases them from the limitations of AHCI, but also provides a wide range of interoperability benefits. In the next section, we'll take a deep dive into the specifics of NMVe and its various incarnations. Before that, though, let's take a look at Intel's newest NVMe-based drives (the first of their kind to land in Tom's Hardware's lab).
Eager to move the dial on NVMe right out of the gate, Intel is introducing a full range of compatible drives. Officially dubbed the SSD DC P3700, P3600, and P3500 the company's latest represent the same general use cases as their SATA-based predecessors. Mainly, the three product families are differentiated based on write performance and endurance, just as we've seen so many times before. Capacities also vary, ranging from 400 GB to a massive 2 TB. All versions are available in either a half-height, half-length (HHHL) PCIe add-in card or a 2.5", 15 mm-thick SFF-8639 form factor.
| Products |
Intel SSD DC P3700
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Intel SSD DC P3600
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Intel SSD DC P3500
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| Pricing |
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| Form Factor | HHHL PCI AIC / 2.5" x 15 mm SFF-8639 | HHHL PCI AIC / 2.5" x 15 mm SFF-8639 | HHHL PCI AIC / 2.5" x 15 mm SFF-8639 |
| User Capacity | 400 to 2000 GB | 400 to 2000 GB | 400 to 2000 GB |
| Interface | x4 PCI Express 3.0 | x4 PCI Express 3.0 | x4 PCI Express 3.0 |
| Sequential Read (MB/s)* | 2800 | 2600 | 2500 |
| Sequential Write (MB/s)* | 1900 | 1700 | 1700 |
| 4 KB Random Read (IOPS)* | 460,000 | 450,000 | 450,000 |
| 4 KB Random Write (IOPS)* | 180,000 | 70,000 | 35,000 |
| Power Consumption (Active) | up to 25 W | up to 25 W | up to 25 W |
| Power Consumption (Idle) | 4 W | 4 W | 4 W |
| Write Endurance (DWPD) | 10 | 3 | 0.3 |
*ratings are "up to"
Compared to the performance figures we're used to seeing in our SSD reviews, these numbers are promising. All three line-ups promise good read performance for both sequential and random operations. Write performance also appears strong, scaling across the trio of product families.
Of course, if you're already familiar with the existing PCIe-based storage hardware out there, these specifications aren't as obscene. In fact, contenders like Micron's P320h and P420m match or exceed many of those bullet points. We even have an OCZ Z-Drive R4 from 2011 that provides similar performance in certain areas.
So, what makes these drives better? In short, cost. The SSD DC P3500 is the most aggressively priced, selling for about $600 at a 400 GB capacity point. The 400 GB P3600 sets you back $783, while the P3700 lands at $1207. For a little bit of perspective, many enterprise-oriented PCIe-based SSDs still command anywhere from $5 to $10 per gigabyte.
For this review, we are focusing on the 800 GB and 1.6 TB Intel SSD DC P3700s. Within each product family, there are big capacity-based differences that typically affect write performance. It's impressive to see write endurance exceeding 36 PB from that 2 TB model in the table below.
| Products |
Intel SSD DC P3700 400 GB
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Intel SSD DC P3700 800 GB
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Intel SSD DC P3700 1600 GB
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Intel SSD DC P3700 2000 GB
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| Form Factor | HHHL PCI AIC / 2.5" x 15mm SFF-8639 | HHHL PCI AIC / 2.5" x 15mm SFF-8639 | HHHL PCI AIC / 2.5" x 15mm SFF-8639 | HHHL PCI AIC / 2.5" x 15mm SFF-8639 |
| User Capacity | 400 GB | 800 GB | 1600 GB | 2000 GB |
| Interface | x4 PCI Express 3.0 | x4 PCI Express 3.0 | x4 PCI Express 3.0 | x4 PCI Express 3.0 |
| Sequential Read (MB/s)* | 2700 | 2800 | 2800 | 2800 |
| Sequential Write (MB/s)* | 1200 | 1900 | 1900 | 1900 |
| 4 KB Random Read (IOPS)* | 450,000 | 460,000 | 450,000 | 450,000 |
| 4 KB Random Write (IOPS)* | 75,000 | 90,000 | 150,000 | 180,000 |
| Power Comsumption (Active) | up to 25 W | up to 25 W | up to 25 W | up to 25 W |
| Power Consumption (Idle) | 4 W | 4 W | 4 W | 4 W |
| Write Endurance | 7.3 PBW | 14.6 PBW | 29.2 PBW | 36.5 PBW |
| Warranty | Five years | Five years | Five years | Five years |
Before we run the SSD DC P3700 through our test suite, lets take a closer look at the technology behind NVMe.
Before we jump into testing Intel's newest storage hardware, we need to take a look back to 2011. Although that was only three years ago, the landscape of SSDs was notably different. Intel and other vendors were pushing SSDs as drop-in hard drive replacements. They occupied the same form factors (2.5" with 7 and 9.5 mm z-heights), utilized the same physical interface (SATA 6Gb/s), and the same device stack (AHCI). Performance and reliability improved at regular intervals. Specifications like performance consistency and write endurance wouldn't be universally recognized for more than a year. While some SSDs saturated the SATA interface in sequential workloads, a majority were bottlenecked inside of the drive itself. Flash controllers, firmware, and NAND hadn't evolved to the point where the host interface presented performance challenges.
Then, in March of 2011, the industry took an incredibly forward-looking stance and released the NVMe 1.0 specification.
And by industry, I mean almost every major player in the flash storage market. The 13-company Promoter Group, backed by 80+ members, included Intel, Micron, Samsung, Dell, EMC, NetApp, IDT and Marvell. Their goal was to free future storage products from the limitations of SATA and AHCI. NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) is a from-the-ground-up specification that replaces AHCI for PCIe-connected SSDs, focusing on efficiency, scalability, and performance. AHCI was developed at a time when words like sectors and cylinders were used to describe storage, and stack overhead was a tiny fraction of the media access time.
What may come as a shock to you is that even though NVMe does a lot to cut out controller and software latency, NAND latency remains the major contributor, illustrated in the slide above. Although this is the reality of flash today, NVMe has the future of non-volatile memory in mind. Resistive memory technologies like Phase Change Memory and Magnetic Tunnel Junction could offer a 1000x speed-up over current NAND. At that point, the bottleneck would push back to the device stack.
But NVMe's role isn't limited to latency reduction. With AHCI, the idea of parallelism wasn't fully integrated into the standard. Features like Native Command Queuing helped optimize transfers, but the interface never allowed SSDs to truly maximize their inherent parallelism.
If you read SSD reviews, you typically see IOPS measured across a range of queue depths, normally up to 32 outstanding commands. That is the point where most SATA-based SSDs achieve their peak performance. It is also the limit of AHCI. Many flash controllers can handle larger queue depths, though. You can see this for yourself from PCIe-based SSDs with their own proprietary drivers. Micron's P320h didn't achieve its peak performance until the queue depth hit 256. With NVMe, not only can the commands per queue increase from 32 to 64,000, but the number of queues increases from 1 to 64,000. Now that's what we call planning for the future.
Driver compatibility was the one major issue that all PCIe-based SSDs had. Every product shipped with proprietary software. Some vendors did a great job; others didn't. And unless your manufacturer of choice included its own option ROM, you couldn't boot from the drive. Even Intel's SSD 910 wasn't bootable. While this practice is generally accepted in enterprise environments, consumers need something a little more foolproof.
With NVMe, there is a standard driver that will be supported across multiple platforms, including BIOS support for booting. Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012 R2, and Linux are a few of the operating systems already equipped to accommodate NVMe-based SSDs. Intel has a standalone driver, too. It remains to be seen whether the company's competitors rely on native support or augment the platform with proprietary software.
Booting Up From Intel's SSD DC P3700
Yes, the SSD DC P3700 will boot, albeit with a whole list of caveats. First, we needed a system that supported UEFI 2.3.1. Check. Then, we needed an operating system with native driver support. Windows Server 2012 R2, check. Finally, we needed to install the software. That proved easier said than done.
My first attempt left me at the Windows installation prompt. Setup was able to see the P3700, but complained that it wasn't bootable. At that point, I entered the BIOS to see if the P3700 showed up. It was nowhere to be found. On a hunch, I went into the boot screen to review my options. There were two options for the DVD-ROM: Legacy and UEFI. Of course, booting to the UEFI entry for the optical drive solved the issue. At that point, Windows not only recognized the P3700, but also allowed us to use it as a boot option. Interestingly, once the installation completed, the P3700 showed up in the BIOS as a UEFI boot option (not as an Intel SSD DC P3700, but as a Windows boot manager device).
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The last step was to compare the boot time of our server going from an 800 GB Intel SSD DC S3700 to an 800 GB Intel SSD DC P3700. Keep in mind that this is a legitimate server; their boot processes are almost never described as fast.
- Intel SSD DC S3700 Boot Time: 64.8 seconds
- Intel SSD DC P3700 Boot Time: 44.5 seconds
We recorded a solid 20-second drop in boot time. Almost 20 seconds of that involves getting through the POST process, too.

As you can see from my diskpart screenshot, Windows recognizes the SSD DC P3700 as a boot device. Interesting, though not altogether surprising, is that the operating system also knows it's an NVMe-based device and where it resides in the PCIe root complex.
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The SSD DC P3700 is an impressive-looking piece of hardware. The half-height, half-length PCIe x4 add-in card is dominated by a large heat sink. Intel doesn't employ any active cooling. It instead relies on airflow from chassis fans to keep this 25 W board under its thermal ceiling.

The drive isn't covered by just a dumb block of aluminum. Rather, what appears to be a decorative label actually conceals a plate that helps funnel air through the heat sink. It forms a channel that exploits the front-to-back cooling of most servers. Moreover, there's actually a heat sink inside. It's dedicated to the controller and sits inside of the larger sink. The smaller heat sink extends beyond the bottom of the larger sink and is held in place by an aluminum band. This allows for more consistent pressure on the processor, increasing the efficiency of heat transfer.
Why did Intel go through so much trouble designing this product's cooling? Like many PCIe-based SSDs and RAID cards, the SSD DC P3700 pulls the full 25 W allowed from a PCI Express slot. Thermal management is a priority though, and there are also lower-power modes that let you use this drive in systems not equipped with adequate cooling.

With the heat sink pulled off, you can see that the board is loaded with NAND packages (in total, our 800 GB model has 36). Each package hosts 20 nm Intel HET (High-Endurance Technology) MLC NAND. In the SSD DC P3700 series, this amount of raw flash adds up to about 25% spare area.
On the controller side of the PCB, all of the NAND and DRAM packages are topped with thermal gap pads that interface with the heat sink.

The SSD DC P3700 uses NAND we've seen on some of Intel's existing products. But the controller is all-new. A great many of the SATA-based SSDs we review employ an eight-channel design. The P3700's processor supports an astounding 18 channels and operates at 400 MHz. Naturally, you get a ton more parallelism, which plays to one of NVMe's strengths.

Our review unit also hosts 1.25 GB (256 MB x 5) of DDR3-1600 DRAM. The NAND and DRAM placement on both sides of the board is identical. They're almost mirror images of each other.
Intel's NVMe-based product line has one other trick up its sleeve. You can buy these drives to drop into a PCIe slot or in 2.5" enclosures. Now, you might be asking how to attach a 2.5" drive that communicates over PCIe, right? That's where the SFF-8639 connector specification comes in.
This enterprise connector specification is where the industry is heading. What might not be totally clear is that it allows for a single connector able to support current SATA and SAS drives, and facilitates PCIe signaling. The unused portion of the SATA/SAS connector exposes the PCI Express lanes, along with the required sideband signals and clocks. But while the connector supports multiple interfaces, it's up to the system manufacturer to expose the right hook-ups. You may see SFF-8639 drive bays limited to SATA/SAS or PCIe, for example. And don't expect this stuff on the desktop anytime soon. As of now, it's an enterprise-only specification.
We really like the table above because it also shows the specifics of SATA Express, which always comes up when we talk about NVMe and SFF-8639. Unlike SFF-8639, SATA Express requires a host mux in order to tell the system whether the drive is using SATA or PCIe for connectivity.
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It's unfortunate that we don't have an SFF-8639-attached SSD DC P3700 to look at because we still have a few concerns. Although the form factor is rated at the same performance as an add-in card, its environmental specs are completely different. Intel says that the PCIe board can handle between 0 and 55 °C. The 2.5" models are only rated for 0 to 35 °C ambient. The add-in card needs the typical 200-300 linear feet per minute to achieve those temperatures. Hitting 35 degrees imposes more serious requirements. Intel's 2 TB model purportedly needs 650 LFM across the drive, for example. That could prove challenging, since most servers put storage up in the front of their enclosures and use fans to pull air over the device's surface.
| Test Hardware | |
|---|---|
| Processor | Intel Core i7-3960X (Sandy Bridge-E), 32 nm, 3.3 GHz, LGA 2011, 15 MB Shared L3, Turbo Boost Enabled |
| Motherboard | Intel DX79SI, X79 Express |
| Memory | G.Skill Ripjaws Z-Series (4 x 4 GB) DDR3-1600 @ DDR3-1600, 1.5 V |
| System Drive | Intel SSD 320 160 GB SATA 3Gb/s |
| Tested Drives | Intel SSD DC P3700 800 GB and 1.6 TB |
| Graphics | AMD FirePro V4800 1 GB |
| Power Supply | OCZ ModXStream Pro 700 W |
| System Software and Drivers | |
| Operating System | Windows 7 x64 Ultimate/Windows Server 2012 R2 |
| DirectX | DirectX 11 |
| Driver | Graphics: AMD 8.883 |
| Benchmark Suite | |
| Iometer v1.1.0 | Four Workers, 4 KB Random: LBA=Full, Span Varying Queue Depths |
| ATTO | v2.4.7, 2 GB, QD=4 |
| Custom | C++, 8 MB Sequential, QD=4 |
| Enterprise Testing: Iometer Workloads | Read | Write | 512 Bytes | 1 KB | 2 KB | 4 KB | 8 KB | 16 KB | 32 KB | 64 KB | 128 KB | 512 KB |
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| Database | 67% | 100% | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a | 100% | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a |
| File Server | 80% | 100% | 10% | 5% | 5% | 60% | 2% | 4% | 4% | 10% | n/a | n/a |
| Web Server | 100% | 100% | 22% | 15% | 8% | 23% | 15% | 2% | 6% | 7% | 1% | 1% |
The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), a working group made up of SSD, flash, and controller vendors, has a testing procedure that attempts to control as many of the variables inherent to SSDs as possible. SNIA’s Solid State Storage Performance Test Specification (SSS PTS) is a great resource for enterprise SSD testing. The procedure does not define what tests should be run, but rather the way in which they are run. This workflow is broken down into four parts:
- Purge: Purging puts the drive at a known starting point. For SSDs, this normally means Secure Erase.
- Workload-Independent Preconditioning: A prescribed workloadthat is unrelated to the test workload.
- Workload-Based Preconditioning: The actual test workload (4 KB random, 128 KB sequential, and so on), which pushes the drive towards a steady state.
- Steady State: The point at which the drive’s performance is no longer changing for the variable being tracked.
These steps are critical when testing SSDs. It’s incredibly easy to not fully condition the drive and still observe out-of-box behavior, which may lead one to think that it’s steady-state. These steps are also important when going between random and sequential writes.
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For all performance tests in this review, the SSS PTS was followed to ensure accurate and repeatable results.
All tests employ random data, when available. Intel's SSD DC P3700 does not perform any compression prior to writing, so there is no difference in performance-based data patterns. We also chose to focus our comparisons on the Micron P320h and P420m, which are quite similar in performance and architecture. Both employ a proprietary driver that, while not NVMe, yields a very close approximation.

At all capacities, the SSD DC P3700 is rated for at least 450,000 read IOPS, which is right where our samples top out. While Intel's drive hangs out in elite company at lower queue depths, it doesn't match pace with the Micron drives as the commands stack up. The P420m and P320h hit an astounding 750,000 IOPS at a queue depth of 256.
Still, the P3700 doubles the read performance of Intel's SSD 910. Micron may appear to be a clear winner, but the real victor depends on your application. It takes specific tasks to hit such lofty queue depths.
Just like Micron's P420m, the SSD DC P3700 doesn't see much performance variation across queue depth settings.
Put it all into perspective: while the P420m is nearly 5,000 IOPS better than the 800 GB Intel SSD, the company's 1.6 TB model enjoys an almost-50,000 IOPS advantage. Only the more expensive OCZ and Micron P320h drives beat the big SSD DC P3700, and it takes large queue depths to do so. Presented with smaller command queues, the Intel hardware appears more balanced.
We were hoping for lower maximum latency results, but Intel's SSD DC P3700 doesn't quite match Micron's P320h, which continues to serve as our gold standard.
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In the following tests, we subject our enterprise-oriented SSDs to 25 hours of continuous random 4 KB writes. We record the IOPS every second, giving us 90,000 data points. We then zoom in on the last 60 minutes to better visualize the results.

The 800 GB SSD DC P3700 puts up impressive numbers during our performance consistency testing. While it's true that Micron's P420m achieves lower response times across a majority of its writes, outliers are enough to pull down the overall performance.
You might be wondering how Intel's new drive posts such low response times, since we just showed you that it's slower than the competition from Micron. Our tests are performed at a conservative queue depth of 32, where the 800 GB SSD DC P3700 holds its own (even though it's less expensive and lower-capacity).
We did receive the 1.6 TB SSD DC P3700 late in our testing process, so we only have data from the 800 GB for this metric. Regardless, though, consistency is excellent, and the smaller model easily beats the P420m and SSD 910. It simply cannot match the tight grouping posted by Micron's P320h, which benefits from expensive, low-latency, SLC NAND.

We also wanted to look at how consistency changed across queue depths. And as you can see, there is very little change as we shift from a command depth of four to 32 to 256. It's particularly impressive that the SSD DC P3700 fares so well at low queue depth settings. You can expect it to behave equally well in server or workstation environments.

As mentioned, the SSD DC P3700 is supported by a native driver in Windows Server 2012 R2 and proprietary software from Intel. We wanted to test for performance differences between the two.
Although the resulting patterns appear quite distinct, standard deviation and overall consistency remained almost identical. We didn't run every one of our tests with both drivers, but instead chose to focus on some of the more strenuous. In a couple of pages, we'll regale you with more comparative data.

We normally don't include out-of-box performance in our charts because enterprise-oriented hardware spends most of its time in a steady state. But I just had to plot this data. Right out of the box, Intel's SSD DC P3700 hit more than 400,000 write IOPS for almost 10 minutes, and didn't settle into steady-state for another two hours. In fact, the drive aggressively fought our efforts to keep it in steady state. Pausing for as little as a few seconds was all it took to push performance back into the 300,000 IOPS-range for short bursts.

Finally, we charted the distribution of response times at steady-state. The SSD DC P3700 gives us a beautiful bell curve without any outliers. This is the sort of consistency we have come to expect from Intel, and the SSD DC P3700 delivers.
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Sequential read performance is excellent as transfer sizes increase, eventually getting close to 2.8 GB/s. We were hoping to see slightly better numbers from the smaller transfers, but the queue depth was too small to really maximize throughput.

Sequential write performance is also excellent. We particularly love the fact that the SSD DC P3700 leaves the gate going strong. Even at small transfer sizes and shallow queue depths, it always clears 1 GB/s. Eventually, the Z-Drive R4 and its eight SandForce controllers speed past. But still, a ceiling of nearly 2 GB/s is laudable.
Although we're giving you numbers from the 800 GB model, Intel's 1.6 GB version demonstrates identical sequential performance.
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Our next set of tests simulates different enterprise-oriented workloads, including database, file server, Web server, and workstation configurations.
The database workload (also categorized as transaction processing) involves purely random I/O. Its profile consists of 67% reads and 33% writes using 8 KB transfers.

The SSD DC P3700's excellent performance at low queue depths shows through in our database profile. As the command queue increases, Micron's P320h and OCZ's Z-Drive show their respective strengths.

Even though we didn't measure much difference between Intel's proprietary driver and Windows' native support in our performance consistency test, that's not the case here. Intel's more optimized implementation typically yields a 5-10% boost at low queue depths, which increases to 20-25% as commands started stacking up. Even though the native driver lets you boot to Windows and get started quickly, you really should make sure Intel's software gets installed before taxing the SSD DC P3700 in a production environment.

In the file server workload, which consists of 80% random reads of varying transfer sizes, we see similar results. The SSD DC P3700 again does an excellent job at low queue depth, and both capacities stay ahead of Micron's P420m.
Our Web server profile closely mirrors our random 4 KB read tests, which makes sense: it's 100% reads of varying transfer sizes.
While the finishing order is close at low queue depths, Micron's drives pull away beyond 32 outstanding commands. The two SSD DC P3700s behave almost identically due to their similar read performance.

Lastly, the workstation benchmark (80% reads, 80% random) results land predictably in our chart as the SSD DC P3700 drops off at higher queue depths.
Summing it all up, Intel's latest performs well at low queue depths and then trails as the count increases. Also, compared to Micron's P420m, the SSD DC P3700 performs better as the workload biases to writes. Unfortunately for Intel, the P3700s can't touch the Micron drives in read performance.
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Video streaming is a demanding workload within the enterprise space. Companies want more HD streams with higher bit-rates and no stuttering. A storage solution well-suited for enterprise-class video delivery has completely different capabilities than something designed for databases. At the end of the day, you're basically looking for exceptional large-block sequential write performance. You also need a high level of consistency that traditionally isn't seen from consumer SSDs. For a more in-depth analysis, take a look at page 10 of Intel SSD 910 Review: PCI Express-Based Enterprise Storage.
Once the drive is in a steady state, we write its entire capacity 100 times. We use 8 MB transfer sizes and a queue depth of four, recording timestamps for each individual write. The graph below reflects 100-point averaging, so that you can better visualize the results.

As we saw in our performance consistency test, the drive's video streaming performance is also excellent. Not only does it easily meet the specification, but it goes beyond. We measured an average in excess of 1950 MB/s at a consistent rate, and we calculated that we could maintain that average with very little buffering (<64 MB). In other words, the SSD DC P3700 can handle three simultaneous streams of uncompressed 4K video at 30 FPS!
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Consolidation has certainly taken its toll on the SSD market over the past few years. There were once numerous manufacturers trying to carve out a piece of the pie, and now a handful of companies dominate the space. As we've mentioned many times before, the brands without manufacturing resources are at a distinct disadvantage. Even some of the names that developed unique and advanced products have been devoured by larger players.
With the introduction of its enterprise-oriented NVMe-based line-up, Intel shows why massive R&D budgets and strong manufacturing eventually win out. Although these aren't the first drives utilizing the latest in solid-state technology (Samsung unveiled its own NVMe-capable contender a while back), Intel's launch is the most impressive thus far. It wasn't content to announce just one product; rather, the company ushered in three product lines in two form factors covering 12 total capacities. Unless you're Intel, Samsung, or Micron, it's hard to pull off an introduction of this magnitude.

As we just saw, Intel's SSD DC P3700 is an impressive performer. Because there are so many models and capacities, it's difficult to set up direct comparisons against the other drives we've reviewed (largely because the P3700's write performance varies depending on model). We did notice that the SSD DC P3700 performed according to Intel's specification though, which bodes well for anticipating the behavior of versions we weren't able to benchmark. This is something we've grown to expect from Intel. If the storage group puts something on a datasheet, you're going to see it in the real world. So, while Micron's hardware proved to be more than a match, the capacities and prices of those SSDs don't necessarily line up with the SSD DC P3700s we tested.
Speaking of pricing, Intel isn't known for its budget-oriented storage offerings. In this case, however, the company is looking to get aggressive in the PCIe-attached market. At ~$3/GB, the SSD DC P3700 is priced very competitively compared to Micron's P420m. Accounting for capacity, Intel should outperform the P420m in most tests. The Micron P320h is still superior in multiple areas, but at almost three times the price, it darned well should be.
Even though these product are aimed at enterprise customers, we have no doubt that certain enthusiasts will see the SSD DC P3500's price and find it reasonable enough. Unlike Intel's SSD 910, these SSDs are all bootable. Also, they perform extremely well at low queue depths, which is how most power users utilize their drives. Even multiple SSDs in a RAID array would have a hard time matching the performance of these PCIe-based solutions.
Maybe it's because we knew this technology was coming several years back, but this feels like an evolutionary step forward. Still, we want more. We now have a device stack that far exceeds the performance of the host interface and NAND; there's no more stumbling over the high latencies of AHCI. The stage is set for the future of storage, and Intel has its stake in the ground as far as enterprise-class NVMe products go. Only time will tell if other companies have the resources and expertise to follow.









