Product ReviewsIntel DC P3600 Series 800GB SSD SSDPEDME800G401

Bootable on Older Machines so grrrrrreat if you have an older machine

If you're looking at this little thingamabob, you probably know what the deal is. As far as SSDs go, especially the NVMe/PCIe flavor, these aren't remotely the fastest around in 2023. However, on older machines which do not support NVMe SSDs (not even with a M.2 to PCIe adapter), these are likely the few options you have. Older CPUs/chipsets/BIOS can not boot up from any common drives attached via PCIe, but this model and a few others have firmware on it which allows your OS to see it on boot up and use it as your system drive. There are workarounds like putting CLOVER or DUET/REFIND on a USB and booting up from that first and then passing it to your PCIe drive, but they defeat the purpose of using these faster than SATA SSD drives for short boot up time.

As far as speeds go, it's not too bad: 2506MB/s sequential reads and 899MB/s writes. Random 4K: 242MB/s and 191MB/s. The writes suffer a bit but I play mental gymnastics and say it's at least faster than SATAIII and less hassle than running RAID... also, commercial grade chips will last longer? It comes with a heatsink? I dunno.

The costs of these aren't too great and you really do have to consider if it's worth it to dig deeper into your older now classic desktop rig. But if you can find a good deal, it's a rather nice upgrade. There are others out there though:

Some NVMe with boot code: Intel SSD DC P3500, P3600 and P3700; HP EX920; Sabrent Rocket 1TB M.2; Micron 9200 and 9300 U.2; HP Z Turbo Drive
Some SATA with boot code: Samsung SM951 AHCI version MZ-HPVxxx0 (not MZ-VPVxxx0); Kingston Predator M.2 PCIe 240GB

There could be more but that's what my research returned. Please double check that before spending on these antique collectible drives.Read full review...

Verified purchase:  Yes | Condition: pre-owned | Sold by: abilai718