Intel’s Optane DC SSD P4800X series is currently the company’s flagship 3D Xpoint-based family of solid state drives for mission-critical enterprise applications. If you recall, 3D Xpoint is a leading-edge, non-volatile memory type that offers significantly better performance than NAND flash memory, but with DRAM-like access times. 3D Xpoint also offers higher endurance than traditional NAND flash memory, but with similar capability to scale in density and capacity. When it was initially announced in partnership with Micron a few years back, Intel claimed that – at the chip level — 3D Xpoint was 1000x faster than NAND, with 1000x the endurance, and 10x the density potential of DRAM.
Today, at Dell Tech World, which is currently underway in Las Vegas, Intel and Dell jointly announced the launch of the new Intel Optane SSD DC D4800X with dual port NVMe interface, which will be employed in Dell’s high-end PowerMax storage platform.
At its core, the Optane SSD DC D4800X isn’t much different than the P4800X. The drives are available with similar capacities and offer up to 2.4GB/s (reads) and 2.3GB/s (writes), with up to 550K IOPS. The drives are particularly adept at handling small file transfers at low-queue depths, and maintaining consistent, low-latency performance while under load, which is what makes them ideal for many enterprise-class workloads
Outfitting the Optane SSD DC D4800X with dual ports, i.e. it has two fully-functional NVMe ports, means there are two paths into and out of the drive, complete with their own controllers, to access data. Should one port fail or become unavailable for whatever reason, data can still be accessed through the second controller and NVMe port.
The dual port Intel Optane SSD DC D4800X is available in the 15mm U.2 form factor in 375GB, 750GB and 1.5TB capacities. Pricing wasn’t available at press time.
