Today, Intel announced the Intel Optane SSD 800P, the latest addition to the Intel Optane technology family of products designed to speed up slower storage, like hard disk drives and SATA SSDs.

Intel Optane technology delivers a combination of low latency, high quality of service and endurance. Like previous Optane products, boasts best-in-class longevity and very fast random access.

But the rest of its performance numbers are mundane at best, and it's only available in two very small capacities - 58GB and 118GB. Adopters will have to pay $129 for 58GB or $199 for 118GB, or $2.22 and $1.68 per gigabyte, respectively. Compared to the other NVMe drives, which average around 50 cents per gigabyte, the 800P is over-priced and under-powered.

Intel Optane SSD 800P can be used as a standalone SSD, in a dual drive setup or in a multiple SSD RAID configuration (PCH-based or CPU-based).

In terms of performance, Intel says that that Optane products really shine in small reads without the benefit of queues, that is, single writes performed sequentially. The company points out that low or no queue-depth small reads comprise a great part of the average workload, and Optane's prowess in this area does help with moment-to-moment performance.

According to the drive's specs, sustained read performance with the 800P are adeuate, but sustained writes are relatively weak.

Intel also claims that 800P performance scales very well when you combine them in striped RAID arrays.

The drive also supports lower-power states, allowing it to operate in devices like laptops and 2 in 1 devices, as well as desktop systems.

The 800P is available in 58GB and 118GB capacities in the M.2 2280 form factor using an NVMe PCIe 3.0 x2 interface. Both capacities are warrantied for five years and rated for 365TBW (TeraBytes Written).