The world of storage has received a range of major enhancements over the last couple of years. Primary storage systems are constantly moving away from hard drives to solid state drives. SSD solutions used to be expensive in the past if you were going for premium performance, but that has changed over the last 2 or 3 years. Prices of SSDs are constantly falling, bringing the capacity per dollar down to where hard drives used to be a few years ago. Not only that, but SSD solutions now come in various form factors that can be deployed in small form factor solutions without the need to sacrifice on performance.

Intel has been one of the pioneers in bringing about the modern SSD era. Starting in 2008, they have brought a range of solutions. In 2015, they introduced the SSD 750 series which brought the PCIe based SSD solution using their MLC NAND flash and running on the NVMe interface. This was a revolution for the client market and just a year after, Intel introduced the M.2 (NGFF or Next Gen Form Factor) standard for consumers. The consumer aimed SSD 600p series brought affordability back to SSDs at a time when Intel was competing directly with another major SSD manufacturer, Samsung.