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

[Steve]

Since we heard that Intel 'August Ridge' SSDs would ship in PCIe form, with speeds exceeding 1000MB/s, we've been eagerly waiting for their return to the enthusiast desktop market. The company is now ready to deliver on the promise with its first PCI Express Gen3 x4 solid state drive, officially known as the Intel SSD 750 Series.

Designed for enthusiasts and workstations, the key feature of Intel's SSD 750 Series is its adoption of Non-Volatile Memory Express or NVMe, a new performance controller interface set to replace the aging AHCI standard. Being more than a decade old, AHCI was designed for hard drives and is therefore optimized for high latency rotating disks rather than low latency non-volatile storage. NVMe on the other hand, brings things like multiple queues, higher queue depths and lower latency with a direct path from the storage to the CPU.

Intel says its PCI Express Gen3 x4 SSDs are rated to deliver sequential read performance of up to 2.4GB/s with sequential writes hitting 1.2GB/s while we can expect latency of less than 20us for sequential access.

Read the complete review.

 

[hahahanoobs]

Some of the results may seem poor, because storage benchmark software is optimized for AHCI, which Allyn described as acting like DX11 while NVMe acts like Mantle/DX12 using your CPU more efficiently to get the most out of the drive.
-pcper

 

[Rq3EWAq]

Very nice drive. Intel is back to compete with Samsung in SSD market. I am eager to see the results and price cuts

 

[Steve]

Some of the results may seem poor, because storage benchmark software is optimized for AHCI, which Allyn described as acting like DX11 while NVMe acts like Mantle/DX12 using your CPU more efficiently to get the most out of the drive.
-pcper

Interesting but that has nothing to do with the results we were talking about.

 

[Frank Barnett]

What am I missing here? They act like its slower so less expensive designed for the consumer market. $1000.00 for a tb?

 

[Footlong]

I always wanted one of these, but they are still too expensive for the regular consumer. Guess I'll stick with Samsung 840 EVO or Samsung 850 PRO.

 

[amstech]

Your overall score is generous based on your conclusions.

 

[Lionvibez]

I always wanted one of these, but they are still too expensive for the regular consumer. Guess I'll stick with Samsung 840 EVO or Samsung 850 PRO.

In canada right now the Samsung 850Pro 512GB is $409.00, Samsung 840 EVO 1TB is $469.88

If the 400GB intel model sticks close to that $390 MSRP I would certainly consider it for a build.

 

[Jad Chaar]

Interesting drive. I find it interesting how the non-driver optimized version sometimes beat the driver-optimized one. I guess some minor driver tweaking is needed.

That said though, at about $1/gigabyte, this is a possible consumer-grade PCIe drive that doesn't break the bank.

 

[madboyv1]

I'd probably be more excited if it were not for the price and the potential performance issues with smaller files... But considering what the drive CAN do in the storage capacity it does it in... the price complaint is largely for the sake of complaining.

 

[Guest]

This nonsense of SATA as yet another bus when we already have PCIe needs to stop. Everything should be on PCIe. It is a shame we still have to deal with USB. Maybe someday that will also just run on top of the PCIe bus and the dream of a single unified bus for everything will come to be.

 

[Guest]

Well I went from a SATA Vertex 4 to a PCIe Revodrive 350 and OMG it was like the difference of going from regular HDD to a good SSD. You go from 400-600 read and write speeds on a SATA to 1700-1800 read write speeds on PCIe, so yeah PCIe is capable of much more.

 

[Guest]

Pretty nice but the sequential write speed is a bit disappointing (read is awesome) to PCI-E offerings from Samsung. The SM951 has read of 2150 and write of 1550.

It also seems to suffer from slow write speeds with files smaller than 4K. Oddly enough this seems to be a common issue with a lot of 1TB+ SSDs so I wonder if it's due to the extra density of those drives. For other manufacturers the 500GB ones seem to work fine but performance drops a little bit when they make the drive 1TB.

 

[cliffordcooley]

This nonsense of SATA as yet another bus when we already have PCIe needs to stop.

You don't understand why we have different bus speeds or you wouldn't have said that. It all started when devices needed a stable frequency, while bus speeds had the freedom to adjust. Though I do agree with you on needing a unified bus frequency, that doesn't make what once was the thing to have nonsense.

SATA is not nonsense. There was and still is a purpose for SATA standard. Prices of SSD's have not dropped low enough for the SATA standard to die just yet.

 

[chuckre]

The review indicates that the drivers are necessary for the best speeds. Will these drivers be available for Linux? Anyone know?

 

[cliffordcooley]

The review indicates that the drivers are necessary for the best speeds. Will these drivers be available for Linux? Anyone know?

I don't see why not.

http://downloadmirror.intel.com/23929/eng/Intel_Linux_NVMe_Driver_Reference_Guide_330602-002.pdf

 

[Guest]

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

 

[Guest]

You know what nonsense is? you thinking 7 pci slots is enough when video cards eat up two slots nowadays. And this is why you aren't a motherboard manufacturer

 

[cliffordcooley]

^^^ Now you are not making any sense!

 

[Steve]

^^^ 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?

 

[mizkitty]

Which NVMe drivers were used...MS or Intel?

And why are some review sites using a special version of CDM?

 

[Steve]

Which NVMe drivers were used...MS or Intel?

And why are some review sites using a special version of CDM?

We used the Intel Windows NVMe driver 1.1.0.1004-x64, no idea about the CDM special version.

 

[mizkitty]

Which NVMe drivers were used...MS or Intel?

And why are some review sites using a special version of CDM?

We used the Intel Windows NVMe driver 1.1.0.1004-x64, no idea about the CDM special version.

JJ from ASUS and Paul's Hardware both mention a special version of CMD...but I haven't seen a link yet...

 

[Uncle Al]

At that size and a $1,000 I'm a little surprised. Kind of like tradeing in your flip phone for the old AT&T "brick" and calling it an upgrade ...... eh?

 

[Hasitte]

This article didn't describe much about compatibility to old chipsets or maybe I didn't catch it, What mobo's are compatible now? I wonder if this would support Intel® Z68 Chipset or older!