Intel today unveiled the Intel Solid State Drive DC P3608 Series, its highest performing SSD for the Data Center. The Intel SSD DC P3608 Series delivers high-performance and low latency with NVMe and eight lanes of PCIe 3.0 to eliminate bottlenecks in HPC workflows, accelerate databases, and gain business insights through real time analytics.

Intel says that the new family of enterprise PCIe SSDs outperforms their existing DC P3600 series and even beating the DC P3700 series in many metrics. To do this, they've essentially put two P3600 SSDs on to one expansion card and widened the interface to 8 lanes of PCIe 3.0. Each of the drives are then seen by the system as its own device. When combined into a RAID 0 array by Intel?s RSTe, it can hit blazing speeds. The two NVMe SSDs also promise incredibly low latency. Intel said the RSTe driver can intelligently split the load between the two separate controllers to keep latency low even when in RAID mode.

An NVMe dual-controller architecture allows scaling with Intel Xeon Processors with multiple cores, evenly distributing the IO of up to 850K random read IOPS while the PCIe 3.0 x8 link enables data transfers of 5GB/s.

The Intel SSD DC P3608 Series is available in capacities of 1.6TB, 3.2TB, and 4TB in a single PCIe 3.0 x8 low-profile add-in-card. The 1.6TB drive is $3,509, the 3.2TB costs $7,009, and the 4TB pushes it all the way to $8,759. For comparison, the 1.2TB Intel 750 drive that?s rated at about half the performance of the P3608 is about $1,000.

Looking at teh sepcs, the 1.6TB has the highest random read performance and a read speed of 5GBps with writes at 2GBps. The 3.2TB cuts random 8K reads in half and sees rated read performance take a hit, with 4.5GBps reads. Write speed improves to 2.6GBps, though, and you do get more than double the capacity.

The largest 4TB version maintains the 5GBps reads and has almost the same random 8K performance, but it has the highest write performance at 3GBps.