Intel today unveiled the Intel Solid-State Drive 750 Series, its highest performing SSD for use in client PC storage devices and workstations. The 750 series delivers greater than four times the performance of SATA-based SSDs by utilizing four lanes of PCIe 3.0 and the NVM Express (NVMe) standard. It is available as both an add-in card for systems with an accessible PCIe 3.0 slot and as a 2.5 inch small form factor solution.

NVMe is a standardized interface that enables higher performance and lower latency than previous generations. The Intel SSD 750 Series offers capacities of 400GB and 1.2TB in Add-In card and 2.5-inch (SFF-8639 connector) form factors.

The SSD 750 is built upon the SSD DC P3700 platform, but its firmware has been optimized to be more suitable for client applications - focused on random performance.

The new series utilizes Intel-Micron's 20nm 128Gbit MLC NAND. The controller is the same 18-channel behemoth running at 400MHz that is found inside the SSD DC P3700.

Similar to the SSD DC P3700, the SSD 750 features full power loss protection that protects all data in the DRAM, including user data in flight.

With PCIe Gen3 x4 support and NVMe queuing interface, the Intel SSD 750 Series delivers a sequential read performance of up to 2.4 GB/s and sequential write speeds of up to 1.2 GB/s. The Intel SSD 750 Series delivers random read IOPS of up to 440K and random write IOPS of up to 290K for 4KB operations. Also, by taking advantage of the direct path from the storage to the CPU by means of NVMe, the Intel SSD 750 Series exhibits low latency of less than 20 ?s for sequential access to the SSD.

Since the SSD 750 utilizes the CPU's PCIe lanes - it should be pluged into your computer's PCIe - there might be some bottlenecks if ypuo hava an Intel Z97 system. That because the Haswell CPUs feature only sixteen PCIe 3.0 lanes. This means that you may have to
free up some GPU PCIe bandwidth because the SSD 750 will take four lanes out of the sixteen.

With Haswell-E and its 40 PCIe 3.0 lanes, there are obviously no issues with bandwidth even with an SLI/CrossFire setup and two SSD 750s. But the X99 (or any other chipset) doesn't support PCIe RAID, so if you were to put two SSD 750s in RAID 0 the only option would be to use software RAID.

As for older chipsets, Intel isn't guaranteeing compatibility with 8-series chipsets and older.

MSPR for the Intel SSD 750 series is $389 and $1,029 for the 400GB and the 1.2 GB versions, respectively.

Intel also announced the availability of the Intel SSD 535 Series which offers a balance of cost and performance for mainstream client PC storage devices.

The Intel SSD 535 Series M.2 form factor delivers performance for thin and light computing devices. But the SSD 535 is also available in traditional 2.5-inch form factors.

The SSD 535 series product line is available in capacities ranging from 120GB to 480GB.It uses the latest 16nm NAND technology and comes with a 5-year limited warranty.

The SSD 535 Series accelerates platform performance with sequential reads of up to 540 megabytes and sequential writes of up to 490 megabytes per second (MB/s) and random read and write input/output operations (IOPS) of up to 48K and 80K respectively.

In addition, Intel SSD 535 Series provides extended battery life through low power modes. Idle power consumption of Intel SSD 535 Series is reduced by >90% over a typical hard disc drive, thereby reducing power consumption from watts to milliwatts.