Intel DC P3520 Enterprise NVMe SSD Review (1.2TB) – With 3D NAND Comes Value

REPORT ANALYSIS AND FINAL THOUGHTS

The Intel DC P3520 isn’t the fastest PCIe SSD out, but it can deliver better performance than what SATA has to offer for sequential or random read workloads. You can easily replace HDD arrays with one of these drives to gain more performance, consume less power, and output less heat. In testing the Intel DCP 3520 1.2TB’s sequential performance, we weren’t quite able to get the rated 1.7GB/s read performance out of it but were close at 1.6GB/s. Write performance, on the other hand, was right where it should be, at 1.3GB/s. During 4K random it hit its spec of 320K IOPS read with ease as well as 26K IOPS write. At 8K its results were half that of 4K’s. During our server workloads, the Intel DC P3520 trailed behind the other PCIe options we have tested but beats out most of the SATA SSDs we have tested up to QD32 and beyond.

FINAL THOUGHTS

It was only a matter of time until we started to see value oriented PCIe SSDs in the enterprise segment. With the many advancements in engineering and manufacturing NAND and other SSDs components and the ever growing demand for more performance and more and more PCIe lanes becoming readily available for use, it seems like this was bound to happen. Sometimes there is a need for more performance than SATA, but you don’t want to have to pay 3-10 times the price for that difference in performance, that’s where the Intel DC P3520 comes in. At around $0.50/GB the Intel DC P3520 delivers a lot of value. It is readily available in capacities ranging from 450GB up to 2TB and there are two form factors for you to choose from, AIC or U.2. Its performance excels in lower QD’s and it has some decent endurance numbers. It is packed with all the enterprise features we have grown to expect from Intel to deliver, and, based on its specs, it is more power efficient option than the many power hungry PCIe SSDs we have tested before it. (This last point we would have loved to show through our testing, however, due to an issue with our current power module we were unable to capture any power consumption results.)

After going through the ringer in today’s testing, we award the Intel DC P3520 our Top Value award.