The news about Intel's new Optane DC 4800X storage technology has been evolving on the web for quite some time and the included support on Intel's Seventh Generation Core processor line was all the confirmation that everyone needed was right around the corner. Now, the first real Optane component has arrived, the SSD DC P4800X Series.

According to Digital Trends, the first Optane DC 4800X drives were built with enterprise use cases in mind. Intel says the consumer versions will come later, but for now, the DC P4800X is bound for all work and not for play. Data centres are supposed to leverage which will be much faster storage solution to handle larger amounts of data without spending a fortune on dedicated RAM.

A report on Yahoo indicates that Optane DC 4800X sits somewhere between RAM and a high-end SSD in terms of reading, write, and latency. Like SSDs, and unlike RAM, it's non-volatile, so cutting its power will hold the data. However, it's capable enough of producing high speeds and low latency that even NVMe drives would drool over. It's also far more durable than NAND-based SSDs, although only extensive testing can say for sure exactly how much longer they will last.

Business users and server administrators can actually install the DC P4800X, which is available as a PCIe add-in-card, and later as a 2.5-inches U.2 drive, and then use Intel's Rapid Storage Technology software to label the drive as memory. Intel's data relating to the improvements don't just show nominally increased speed. Depending on what metric user are using, the drivers often break the benchmarks entirely.

Queue depth is the number of tasks currently waiting in line to read or write to the drive. On spinning disk drives, this kind of tasks can pile up quickly, leading to a queue depth in the hundreds. During benchmarking, that means the drive is constantly running at its topmost speed, reading and writing as quickly as possible to push through the tasks in its queue.