Last year Intel introduced the P3700, P3600 and P3500 series, the first SSDs with the PCI-Express interface that combined four lanes with the modern NVMe protocol. This combination means that these professional SSDs are capable of higher speeds than the conventional Serial ATA and AHCI models. We tested the 400GB variant of the P3700 series.

A high-end PC without an SSD is almost unthinkable and SSDs are taking the place of the old hard disk in servers as well. The considerably better performance of SSDs when it comes to read and write commands, but as well as with random workloads, mean that changing HDDs to SSDs can give a significant boost in performance for a lot of server tasks. Certainly web servers ? where a lot of clients access a lot of small files simultaneously ? and database servers ? where there are a lot of random read- and write commands ? can benefit a great deal by using SSDs. We can confirm this from our own experience with the servers of Hardware.Info.

Most server SSDs up until now come in 2.5? size and use the Serial ATA interface, the same as a regular computer would. This is because by using an existing form factor and interface the SSDs are a drop-in replacement for regular hard disks. However Serial ATA, including SATA600, is a limiting factor for SSDs. The interface is limited to 600 MB/s, in practice this mostly means 550 MB/s. Modern SSDs can reach these speeds easily by using multiple parallel flashchips. Because Serial ATA 1200 is not in the making SSD manufacturers are looking at PCI-Express as new interface. PCI-Express 3.0 with two lanes can manage speeds of up to 2 GB/s, PCI-Express 3.0 x4 can reach 4 GB/s.