Intel SSD 750 PCIe SSD Review: NVMe for the Client
by Kristian Vättö on April 2, 2015 12:00 PM ESTMixed Random Read/Write Performance
Mixed read/write tests are also a new addition to our test suite. In real world applications a significant portion of workloads are mixed, meaning that there are both read and write IOs. Our Storage Bench benchmarks already illustrate mixed workloads by being based on actual real world IO traces, but until now we haven't had a proper synthetic way to measure mixed performance.
The benchmark is divided into two tests. The first one tests mixed performance with 4KB random IOs at six different read/write distributions starting at 100% reads and adding 20% of writes in each phase. Because we are dealing with a mixed workload that contains reads, the drive is first filled with 128KB sequential data to ensure valid results. Similarly, because the IO pattern is random, I've limited the LBA span to 16GB to ensure that the results aren't affected by IO consistency. The queue depth of the 4KB random test is three.
Again, for the sake of readability, I provide both an average based bar graph as well as a line graph with the full data on it. The bar graph represents an average of all six read/write distribution data rates for quick comparison, whereas the line graph includes a separate data point for each tested distribution.
The SSD 750 does very well in mixed random workloads, especially when compared to the SM951 that is slower than most high-end SATA drives. The performance scales quite nicely as the portion of writes is increased.
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Mixed Sequential Read/Write Performance
The sequential mixed workload tests are also tested with a full drive, but I've not limited the LBA range as that's not needed with sequential data patterns. The queue depth for the tests is one.
In mixed sequential workloads, however, the SSD 750 and SM951 are practically indentical. Both deliver excellent performance at 100% reads and writes, but the performance does drop significantly once reads and writes are mixed. Even with the drop, the two push out 400MB/s whereas most SATA drives manage ~200MB/s, so PCIe certainly has a big advantage here.
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p1esk - Friday, April 3, 2015 - link
Let me say that again: this is a consumer drive. That's why it is so cheap compared to 3700. A large Hollywood production company will surely be able to afford enough of these drives not to worry about exceeding 128TB write limits.emn13 - Saturday, April 4, 2015 - link
I'm sure they can afford it - but why pay more than necessary? Compared to the competition, this is an unusally low write endurace for such a high-end drive. Take a peek at say the 1TB 850 Pro; that's likely to be considerably cheaper (and perhaps more deserving of the "consumer" monniker), and it's NAND is rated for a little more than 6000TB of (raw) writes.128TB? That's really, really unusual for a drive like this.
earl colby pottinger - Tuesday, April 7, 2015 - link
Because that is how you run your company out of business by being cheap of key hardware.If you are producing enough 4K video to stress this drive, you are producing enough video that the cost of production is way greater that the cost of drives that you don't have to worry about this type of failure.
I have seen tons of companies go out of business or lose out on thousands of dollars in sales because they tried to save a few hundred dollars up-front against my advice.
Stop looking for cheap solutions if the storage is critical to the running of your business.
emn13 - Saturday, April 4, 2015 - link
I do a lot of large-file snapshot/restore stuff, and I definitely write a lot more than 70gb a day. Intel's own consumer level 335 was rated for 700TB, and that was a much smaller drive. More specifically, this hasn't been a problem on other drives - neither on ssd's, nor on hdds. While it's conceivable there are more efficient ways of working from the perspective of the drive, that's a hassle to arrange.Perhaps it's worth pointing you to the SSD endurance experiment: http://techreport.com/review/26523/the-ssd-enduran...
All of these drives approximately 240GB drives survived at least 700gb, and it was specifically the intel that seemingly intentionally bricked itself then.
This drive is 5 time larger, and is rated for a fraction of that. This is pretty unreasonable to my mind.
darkgreen - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link
This part of the review made be curse:"...with the X25-M. It wasn't the first SSD on the market, but it was the first drive that delivered the aspects we now take for granted: high, consistent and reliable performance."
Arrrgh...
I was one of the early adopters who paid a ton for the XM-25. If you go back through the archives, though, you'll see Intel's XM-25 had a fragmentation bug that made it slower than a spinning platter hard drive after a bit of use. I was in that situation. Intel released a "fix" based on a script run on some old freeware, but they didn't support the fix *at all* and for many people (including me) it would never work.
So INTEL's "high, consistent and reliable performance" turned out to be total crap. I paid over $400 for what turned out to be a doorstop and had to replace it with a Corsair SSD a short time later. INTEL never offered a refund, support, or even an apology to all the people they had sold a totally nonfunctional product to. I still have that drive in my electronic junk pile and I curse INTEL every time it catches my eye.
I'm waiting for good PCIe SSD before my next PC build, unfortunately I would say INTEL products don't count because in the past we've seen (inarguably, and documented on this very site!) that they mass release buggy products and if you happen to have bought one you're just hung out to dry when they turn out to have had major design errors.
Ugh. at least mention the history here and caution people instead of suggesting Intel is reliable.
Makaveli - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link
anecdotal evidence!!I've have two G2 160GB intel drives in Raid 0 for a couple years now and they been solid no issues.
So I disagree with your post do I win ?
darkgreen - Friday, April 3, 2015 - link
I wasn't expected that kind of reply. Google "intel replicated SSD firmware problem" (without the quotes) and you can read about the various things that happened, many of which were first reported at this very site, but I guess it WAS 6 years ago so I shouldn't expect everyone to know about it.I was running win 7 64-bit and had a G1. You'll see reports that ALL G1's had a fragmentation issue that made them slower than spinning platters after a bit of use, and you'll see mainstream media reports about how the "fix" instead bricked drives for many users on win 7 64-bit .
Not anecdotes, mainstream reporting and I was one of the thousands affected and can confirm that even after those reports Intel did nothing for non-enterprise users but delete the 50-page thread on their support site.
Kristian Vättö - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link
To put it frankly, there's no SSD (or HDD) manufacturer that hasn't had any issues, so you might as well go back to the good ol' pen&paper if you want something truly reliable ;-)Raniz - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link
Until the pen explodes and you have to buy a new shirtdarkgreen - Friday, April 3, 2015 - link
Agreed. In coming up with a good google search for the guy above who apparently hadn't heard about this I encountered a lot of articles about necessary firmware updates for other vendors as well. All I know is that Intel left consumers without options or replacements, I don't know what happened in all those other cases. I suppose it's a good reason to think about how important the storage division is to any company you buy from, though. Intel might, conceptually, want to support SSDs but I'd imagine all the management focus is on enterprise and processors. So who do you go with? OCZ (yikes! but maybe okay after the buyout?) Any thoughts on which companies actually value consumer purchases of their SSDs as "mission-critical" ?