Intel SSD 750 SSD Review: PCIe storage for the consumer market

[Hasitte]

^^^ Now you are not making any sense!

Does one laugh or cry?

Overpriced, period. The PCIe buss does most of the work.

When you drive to work does the road do most of the work?

I laugh harder then I should!

 

[Sammer003]

I'm Curious - Where does the source of the file copy reside? RAM disk, SATA disk, or another PCIe disk?

 

[Steve]

I'm Curious - Where does the source of the file copy reside? RAM disk, SATA disk, or another PCIe disk?

On-disk copy.

 

[Bluxwave]

Thankyou this proves that an evo 850 is just as good as 750 for load times of games... well not much difference. eg loading GTA 5

 

[Internet FX1974]

This review seems wrong because the disk score reached 1.5GB/s on a sequential read which is PCIe 2.0. On a Xeon-based Linux server with sequential reads and O_DIRECT we can hit 2.9GB/s with this card reliably. With a second card we reached 1.5GB/s, like Steve did, and we were confused... until we plugged it into a Windows machine, removed it, and put it back in the server, achieving 2.9GB/s reliably like the first. We realized at one point we had it in a PCIe 2.0 slot briefly before our tests. It seems these cards can get locked into PCIe 2.0 negotiation and become lethargic even in a PCIe 3.0 slot. Initializing the card with the Windows+Intel NVMe driver woke it back up and it now speaks PCIe 3.0 for double the speed. So... the reviewer may want to recheck this; this card does in fact reach, or in our case exceed, the advertised speed.

 

[Steve]

This review seems wrong because the disk score reached 1.5GB/s on a sequential read which is PCIe 2.0. On a Xeon-based Linux server with sequential reads and O_DIRECT we can hit 2.9GB/s with this card reliably. With a second card we reached 1.5GB/s, like Steve did, and we were confused... until we plugged it into a Windows machine, removed it, and put it back in the server, achieving 2.9GB/s reliably like the first. We realized at one point we had it in a PCIe 2.0 slot briefly before our tests. It seems these cards can get locked into PCIe 2.0 negotiation and become lethargic even in a PCIe 3.0 slot. Initializing the card with the Windows+Intel NVMe driver woke it back up and it now speaks PCIe 3.0 for double the speed. So... the reviewer may want to recheck this; this card does in fact reach, or in our case exceed, the advertised speed.

2.9GB/s is well above the quoted speed by Intel for sequential reads so that seems unlikely. There are dozens of reviews online now and they pretty much all show the same performance we did, Intel themselves were happy with the results

Our AS SSD sequential read result was 2.2GB/s so the device is clearly using PCIe 3.0.

 

[harrod]

2.9GB/s is well above the quoted speed by Intel for sequential reads so that seems unlikely. There are dozens of reviews online now and they pretty much all show the same performance we did, Intel themselves were happy with the results

Our AS SSD sequential read result was 2.2GB/s so the device is clearly using PCIe 3.0.

Hello. I don't believe the "stuck in PCIe 2.0 mode" is the issue.

I believe you are using an old version of CDM that can not properly benchmark the drive. JayJay from ASUS (before your review even came out) states that a beta version of CDM was required to properly benchmark NVMe drives and he got 2.7GB/s sequential reads (at the 25min 15sec point)

The CDM website http://crystalmark.info/?lang=en shows "Preliminary support SAMSUNG SSD 950 PRO (NVMe)" as of 2016/01/16. And NVM Express Inc stated themsleves on May 11, 2015 that a development version was required to properly benchmark NVMe drives:

Due to limited support for large queue depths and multiple workers, the full performance of NVMe SSDs could not be seen in Crystal Disk Mark 3.0.4 . For example, the maximum read bandwidth on this build for one NVMe drive was ~ 1.5 GB/s and the maximum IOPs was ~ 150K IOPs.

The developer has completed a new version, revision 4.0.3, that adds deeper queues and multiple worker threads to the benchmark and enables measurement of the true performance of an NVMe SSD. The same NVMe drive now measures over 2 GB/s for bandwidth and ~ 450K IOPs on random I/O. In order to fully saturate the NVMe drives, recommendations are a queue depth of at least 32 and a minimum of 8 worker threads for 4K random testing. Check it out at http://crystalmark.info/?lang=en.

So can you please update your review using a newer version of CDM as your results are showing up on google image search and are not reflecting the true potential of this drive.

Thanks.