If you only pay attention to the consumer solid-state drive market, you might think Intel is an also-ran drive maker, occasionally churning out mainstream offerings like the SSD 545s Series (512GB) that, while solid options often with long warranties, don't lead when it comes to performance or low pricing. But Intel's drives are huge in the enterprise/server world where, according to memory and storage analysts at DRAMeXchange, the company commands a leading 30 percent of a market that—unlike consumer storage—has comparatively high margins, and where customers care a whole lot more about reliability and endurance than raw performance speeds and/or price. Understanding Intel's enterprise storage roots is key to grokking its higher-end consumer drives, as they're often an evolution of an enterprise product. This isn't dissimilar to the way the company's enthusiast-class Core X chips like the Intel Core i9-7980XE Extreme Edition are a consumer-focused take on the company's Xeon C...
Intel's first consumer Optane SSD offers an enticing taste of the future of storage. But cramped capacities, high prices, and form factor limitations mean the 900P Series, though packed with potential, is best suited to a narrow swath of desktop enthusiasts.
Far faster than any traditional NAND-based SSD in some tests; Particularly excels at small file reads and writes for fast boot and program load times; Extremely high endurance rating
Lags behind less expensive Samsung M.2 drives in sequential performance; Bulky form factor means no laptop compatibility; Low capacity limits appeal for video editors or other high-end content creators