Intel SSD 750 PCIe SSD Review: NVMe for the Client
by Kristian Vättö on April 2, 2015 12:00 PM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy
While The Destroyer focuses on sustained and worst-case performance by hammering the drive with nearly 1TB worth of writes, the Heavy trace provides a more typical enthusiast and power user workload. By writing less to the drive, the Heavy trace doesn't drive the SSD into steady-state and thus the trace gives us a good idea of peak performance combined with some basic garbage collection routines.
| AnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy | ||||||||||||
| Workload | Description | Applications Used | ||||||||||
| Photo Editing | Import images, edit, export | Adobe Photoshop | ||||||||||
| Gaming | Pllay games, load levels | Starcraft II, World of Warcraft | ||||||||||
| Content Creation | HTML editing | Dreamweaver | ||||||||||
| General Productivity | Browse the web, manage local email, document creation, application install, virus/malware scan | Chrome, IE10, Outlook, Windows 8, AxCrypt, uTorrent, AdAware | ||||||||||
| Application Development | Compile Chromium | Visual Studio 2008 | ||||||||||
The Heavy trace drops virtualization from the equation and goes a bit lighter on photo editing and gaming, making it more relevant to the majority of end-users.
| AnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy - Specs | ||||||||||||
| Reads | 2.17 million | |||||||||||
| Writes | 1.78 million | |||||||||||
| Total IO Operations | 3.99 million | |||||||||||
| Total GB Read | 48.63 GB | |||||||||||
| Total GB Written | 106.32 GB | |||||||||||
| Average Queue Depth | ~4.6 | |||||||||||
| Focus | Peak IO, basic GC routines | |||||||||||
The Heavy trace is actually more write-centric than The Destroyer is. A part of that is explained by the lack of virtualization because operating systems tend to be read-intensive, be that a local or virtual system. The total number of IOs is less than 10% of The Destroyer's IOs, so the Heavy trace is much easier for the drive and doesn't even overwrite the drive once.
| AnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy - IO Breakdown | |||||||||||
| IO Size | <4KB | 4KB | 8KB | 16KB | 32KB | 64KB | 128KB | ||||
| % of Total | 7.8% | 29.2% | 3.5% | 10.3% | 10.8% | 4.1% | 21.7% | ||||
The Heavy trace has more focus on 16KB and 32KB IO sizes, but more than half of the IOs are still either 4KB or 128KB. About 43% of the IOs are sequential with the rest being slightly more full random than pseudo-random.
| AnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy - QD Breakdown | ||||||||||||
| Queue Depth | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4-5 | 6-10 | 11-20 | 21-32 | >32 | ||||
| % of Total | 63.5% | 10.4% | 5.1% | 5.0% | 6.4% | 6.0% | 3.2% | 0.3% | ||||
In terms of queue depths the Heavy trace is even more focused on very low queue depths with three fourths happening at queue depth of one or two.
I'm reporting the same performance metrics as in The Destroyer benchmark, but I'm running the drive in both empty and full states. Some manufacturers tend to focus intensively on peak performance on an empty drive, but in reality the drive will always contain some data. Testing the drive in full state gives us valuable information whether the drive loses performance once it's filled with data.
It turns out that the SM951 is overall faster than the SSD 750 in our heavy trace as it beats the SSD 750 in both data rate and average latency. I was expecting the SSD 750 to do better due to NVMe, but it looks like the SM951 is a very capable drive despite lacking NVMe (although there appears to be an NVMe version too after all). On the other hand, I'm not too surprised because the SM951 has specifically been built for client workloads, whereas the SSD 750 has an enterprise heritage and even on the client side it's designed for the most intensive workloads.
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oddbjorn - Tuesday, April 14, 2015 - link
I just recieved my 750 yesterday and soon found myself slightly bummed out by the lacking NVMe BIOS-support in my ASUS P8Z77-V motherboard. I managed to get the drive working (albeit non-bootable) by placing it in the black PCIe 2.0 slot of the mainboard, but this is hardly a long term solution. I posted a question to the https://pcdiy.asus.com/ website regarding possible future support for these motherboards and this morning they had publised a poll to check the interest for BIOS/UEFI-support for NVMe's. Please vote here if you (like me) would like to see this implemented! https://pcdiy.asus.com/2015/04/asus-nvme-support-p...Elchi - Wednesday, April 15, 2015 - link
If you are a happy owner of an older ASUS MB (z77, x79, z87) please vote for NVme support !http://pcdiy.asus.com/2015/04/asus-nvme-support-po...
iliketoprogrammeoo99 - Monday, April 20, 2015 - link
hey, this drive is now on preorder at amazon!http://amzn.to/1DDKwoI
only $449 on amazon.
vventurelli74 - Monday, May 4, 2015 - link
Lets say I had an Intel 5520 Chipset based computer that has multiple PCIe 2.0 Slots. I would be able to get almost the maximum read performance (Since PCIe 2.0 is 500MB/s per 1X, 4X = 2000MB/s, which is exciting on an older computer. I am curious as to if this would be a bootable solution on my desktop though. With 12 Cores and 24 Threads, this computer is far from under-powered, and it would be nice to breath life into this machine, but the BIOS would have no NVMe support that I can think of. I know it has Intel SSD support, but this is from a different era. I wish someone could confirm that this either will, or will not be bootable on non-MVMe mobo's. I am getting conflicting answers.vventurelli74 - Monday, May 4, 2015 - link
Nevermind, finally found the requirements that this drive will not be bootable on on NVMe machines, whats more is even using it as a 'secondary' drive requires UEFI apparently. My computer wouldn't be able to use this card at all? That would suck.xyvyx2 - Friday, May 8, 2015 - link
Great review!Kristian, any chance you have two of these drives in the same machine & you could test RAID0 performance? I'm running into some slow read performance when using two Samsung PCIe drives in a Dell server w/ a RAID1 or RAID0 config. It's not like regular bottlenecking where you hit a performance cap, but where transfer rate drops down to ~ 1/5th the speed at a lower xfer rate.
I thought this was just a Storage Spaces problem, but the same holds true w/ regular windows software raid. I got up to about 4,200 MB/sec, then it tanked. I then ran two simultaneous ATTO tests on two of the drives and they both behaved normally & peaked at 2,700 MB/sec... so I don't think I'm hitting a PCIe bus limitation... I think it's all software.
I posted more detail on Technet here:
https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/...
shadowfang - Saturday, September 26, 2015 - link
How does the pcie card perform on a system without nvme?