At PAX East, what appears to be the new Intel SSD 750 Series was spotted:
The above article mentiones the 750 will be available in 400GB and 1.2TB versions, with an 800GB model 'being considered internally'. Those capacities sound familiar – look at this crop of the specs for the P3500/P3600/P3700 Series:
Note the P3500 has identical capacity grades. As one more point of comparison, look at this leaked screen shot of the UNH-IOL compatibility list:
Source: TweakTown
…so with what appears to be identical firmware revisions, it's a safe bet that the upcoming SSD 750 Series will borrow the same fire-breathing 18-channel controller present in the Intel SSD DC P3700 (reviewed here). The packaging may be more consumer oriented, and the power is likely dialed back a bit as to produce less heat in more airflow constrained consumer PC cases, but it's looking more and more like the SSD 750 will be a reasonably quick consumer / prosumer / workstation SSD. Given that the P3500 launched at $1.50/GB, we hope to see the 750 launch for far less.
My biggest beef with this upcoming consumer NVMe part from Intel is the (possible) lack of an 800GB capacity. Many power users will consider 400GB too small, but would then be forced to jump 3x in capacity (and price) to the 1.2TB model. That might be ok for enterprise budgets, but it won't fly for PC users who can choose from other PCIe SSDs that fill that possible 800-960GB void in Intel's lineup.
Some austrian retailers have
Some austrian retailers have the 1.2TB version on preorder
Where are people buying the
Where are people buying the existing P3500? I can only find some over-priced resellers on Amazon.
I looked for it a while ago
I looked for it a while ago and found that the P3500 was only available through OEMs. Really disappointing.
Going to be a good time to
Going to be a good time to build if you have the $$$ considering…
x99
DDR4
Titan X
SSD 750 with NVMe
Why it it so hard to build
Why it it so hard to build some fast PCIe 3.0 x4 or x8 NVMe drives and sell them through regular retail channels? The technology has been available for over 4 years, and there are now millions of systems using UEFI, so the market is there. Samsung should be mass-producing SM951 SSDs and pushing them hard, until everyone wants one. Most people just don’t realize how much of a bottle neck SATA creates in the flow of data. Once everyone realizes that there’s a much faster alternative, these drives will sell themselves. Samsung’s strategy of trickling drives out through OEM channels is ridiculous,and I can only surmise that certain OEMs have paid heavy kick-backs to Samsung for the limitation. The first company that sells such a drive retail for a reasonable price will rule the industry and make a fortune. What are they waiting for?
I’ve seen the performance
I’ve seen the performance specs for this drive and they’re ungodly fast. In some areas it will be faster than 4x480GB 730 ssd’s in raid0. Off the top of my head I think it’s the controller out of the P3500 that’s been overclocked a bit, similar to how the 730SSD was based off an enterprise one with an overclocked controller.