Benchmarks: Real-World Applications
Despite the patchy copying performance, the Intel 600p gets off to a good start in our first real-world application test. The game installation took just 85 seconds which is one of the best results we've seen to date, only behind the Samsung SSD 950 Pro.
The virus scan test results are weak and here the Intel 600p was slower than a good number of SATA SSDs, including a few budget models such as the 850 Evo.
Okay, so what exactly is going on here? The Intel 600p took an unbelievable 455 seconds to complete our Acronis True Image 2015 backup test. Previously we've found slow SSDs to take around 320 seconds (five and a half minutes), so the 600p's result are a bit baffling. Comparatively, other M.2 NVMe drives have recorded a backup time of less than three minutes.
Initially I had assumed there was a problem with the test setup, so I reinstalled Windows 10 on the 600p and tried again, only to receive the same result. I then tried a second test system, again the same weak performance was found. Just to be sure I slapped the Samsung SSD 950 Pro in and walla, back to super-fast backup times.
We're starting to see a pattern with these large file transfer tests. This time when extracting a 38.12GB archive the Intel 600p again displayed abysmal performance taking 379 seconds, significantly longer than even the slowest SATA SSDs.
Here we see why the Intel 600p was so slow, the average throughput was less than 100MB/s. Although the file extraction starts at roughly 450MB/s, after 10 seconds it drops down to 400MB/s and at around the 30 second mark we are at 300MB/s. The transfer speed dropped below 200MB/s after two minutes and then finally below 100MB/s after five minutes where it sat for the remainder of the test.