In fact, the Intel SSD 750 series offers such performance that Intel product marketing engineer Jeff Fick claims the drives will deliver the “highest SSD performance” anyone will see for a long time. So how fast are they?

The drives can deliver read speeds of up to 2400MB/s and write speeds of up to 1200MB/s, but that’s not all. They can hit 440,000 IOPS in read and 290,000 IOPS in write mode. The drives employ 20nm class chips.

“The sequential performance is quite high as well when we compare it to SATA-based products," said Fick.

Fick added that Intel’s focus was on random performance, demanded by workstation users.

These aren’t Intel’s first non-SATA drives, but they are the first PCI and NVMe drives intended for individual users. The company’s previous PCIe solutions were designed for data centres rather than workstations.

While the drives aren’t available in SATA flavours, there is a 2.5-inch version, but it’s 15mm thick and requires a special connector which you won’t find on most machines. The PCIe model ships in the form of a half-height PCIe card.