Intel SSD 750 PCIe SSD Review: NVMe for the Client
by Kristian Vättö on April 2, 2015 12:00 PM ESTFinal Words
For years Intel has been criticized for not caring about the client SSD space anymore. The X25-M and its different generations were all brilliant drives and essentially defined the standards for a good client SSD, but since then none of Intel's client SSDs have had the same "wow" effect. That's not to say that Intel's later client SSDs have been inferior, it's just that they haven't really had any competitive advantage over the other drives on the market. It's no secret that Intel changed its SSD strategy to focus on the enterprise segment and frankly it still makes a lot of sense because the profits are more lucrative and enterprise has a lot more room for innovation as the customers value more than just rock-bottom pricing.
With the release of the SSD 750, it's safe to say that any argument of Intel not caring about the client market is now invalid. Intel does care, but rather than bringing products with new complex technologies to the market at a very early stage, Intel wants to ensure that the market is ready and there's industry wide support for the product. After all, NVMe requires BIOS support and that support has only been present for a few months now, making it logical not to release the SSD 750 any sooner.
Given the enterprise background of the SSD 750, it's more optimized for consistency than raw peak performance. The SM951, on the other hand, is a more generic client drive that concentrates on peak performance to improve performance under typical client workloads. That's visible in our benchmarks because the only test where the SSD 750 is able to beat the SM951 is The Destoyer trace, which illustrates a very IO intensive workload that only applies to power users and professionals. It makes sense for Intel to focus on that very specific target group because those are the people who are willing to pay premium for higher storage performance.
With that said, I'm not sure if I fully agree with Intel's heavy random IO focus. The sequential performance isn't bad, but I think the SSD 750 as it stands today is a bit unbalanced and could use some improvements to sequential performance even if it came at the cost of random performance.
| Price Comparison (4/2/2015) | |||||
| 128GB | 256GB | 400GB | 512GB | 1.2TB | |
| Intel SSD 750 (MSRP) | - | - | $389 | $1,029 | |
| Samsung SM951 | $120 | $239 | - | $459 | - |
RamCity actually just got its first batch of SM951s this week, so I've included it in the table for comparison (note that the prices on RamCity's website are in AUD, so I've translated them into USD and also subtracted the 10% tax that is only applicable to Australian orders). The SSD 750 is fairly competitive in price, although obviously you have to fork out more money than you would for a similar capacity SATA drive. Nevertheless, going under a dollar per gigabyte is very reasonable given the performance and full power loss protection that you get with the SSD 750.
All in all, the SSD 750 is definitely a product I recommend as it's the fastest drive for IO intensive workloads by a large margin. I can't say it's perfect and for slightly lighter IO workloads the SM951 wins my recommendation due to its more client-oriented design, but the SSD 750 is really a no compromise product that is aimed for a relatively small high-end niche, and honestly it's the only considerable option in its niche. If your IO workload needs the storage performance of tomorrow, Intel and the SSD 750 have you covered today.
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Kristian Vättö - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link
That's up to the motherboard manufacturers. If they provide BIOS with NVMe support then yes, but I wouldn't get my hopes up as the motherboard OEMs don't usually do updates for old boards.vailr - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link
If Z97 board bioses from Asus, Gigabyte, etc. are going to be upgradeable to support Broadwell for all desktop (socket 1150) motherboards, wouldn't they also want to include NVMe support? I'm assuming such support is at least within the realm of possibility, for both Z87 and Z97 boards.TheRealPD - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link
Has anyone worked out exactly what the limitation is/why the bios needs upgrading yet?Simply that I had the idea that the P3700 had it's own nvme orom, nominally akin to a raid card... ...& that people have had issues with the updated mobo bioses replacing intel's one with a generic one...
...which kind of suggests that the bios update could conceivably not be a requirement for some nvme drives.
vailr - Friday, April 3, 2015 - link
A motherboard bios update would be required to provide bootability. Without that update, an NVMe drive could only function as a secondary storage drive. As stated elsewhere, each device model needs specific support added to the motherboard bios. Samsung's SM941 (an M.2 SSD form factor device) is a prime example of this conundrum, and why it's not generally available as a retail device. Although it can be found for sale at Newegg or on eBay.TheRealPD - Friday, April 3, 2015 - link
Ummmm... Well, for example, looking at http://www.thessdreview.com/Forums/ssd-discussion/... then the P3700 could be used as a boot drive on a Z87 board in July 2014 - so clearly that wasn't using a mobo bios with an added nvme orom as ami hadn't even released their generic nvme orom that's being added to the Z97 boards.(& from recollection, on Z97 boards, in Windows the P3700 is detected as an intel nvme device without the bios update... ...& an ami nvme one with the update)
This appears to effectively the same as, say, an lsi sas raid card loading it's own orom during the boot process & the drives on it becoming bootable - as obviously, as new raid cards with new feature sets are introduced, you don't have to have updates for every mobo bios.
Now, whilst I can clearly appreciate that *if* a nvme drive didn't have it's own orom then there would be issues, it really doesn't seem to be the case with drives that do... ...so is there some other issue with the nvme feature set or...?
Now, obviously this review is about another intel nvme pcie ssd - so it might be reasonable to imagine that it could well also have it's own orom - but, more generally, I'm questioning the assumption that just because it's an nvme drive you can *only* fully utilise it with a board with an updated bios...
...& that if it's the case that some nvme ssds will & some won't have their own orom (& it doesn't affect the feature set), it would be a handy thing to see talked about in the reviews as it means that people with older machines are neither put off buying nor buy an inappropriate ssd when more consumer orientated ones are released.
TheRealPD - Saturday, April 4, 2015 - link
I think I've kind of found the answer via a few different sources - it's not that nvme drives necessarily won't work properly with booting & whatnot on older boards... it's that there's no stated consistency as to what will & won't work...So apparently they can simply not work on some boards d.t. a bios conflict & there can separately be address space issues... So the ami nvme orom & uefi bios updates are about compatibility - *not* that an nvme ssd with its own orom will or won't necessarily work without them on any particular setup.
it would be very useful if there was some extra info about this though...
- well, it's conceivable that at least part of the problem is akin to the issues on much older boards with the free bios capacity for oroms & multiple raid configurations... ...where if you attempted to both enable all of the onboard controllers for raid (as this alters the bios behaviour to load them) &/or had too many additional controllers then one or more of them simply wouldn't operate d.t. the bios limitation; whereas they'd all work both individually & with smaller no's enabled/installed... ...so people with older machines who haven't seen this issue previously simply because they've never used cards with their own oroms or the ssd is the extra thing where they're hitting the limit, are now seeing what some of us experienced years ago.
- or, similarly, that there's a min uefi version that's needed - I know that intel's recommending 2.3.1 or later for compatibility but clearly they were working on some boards prior to that...
pesho00 - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link
Why they omit M2? I really think this is a mistake missing the whole mobile market while SM951 will penetrate both!Kristian Vättö - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link
Because M.2 would melt with that beast of a controller.metayoshi - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link
The Idle power spec of this drive is 4W, while the SM951 is at 50 mW with an L1.2 power consumption at 2mW. Your notebook's battery life will suffer greatly with a drive this power hungry.jwilliams4200 - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link
Even though you could not run the performance tests with additional overprovisioning on the 750, you should still show the comparison SSDs with additional overprovisioning.The fair comparison is NOT with the Intel 750 no OP versus other SSDs with no OP. The comparison you should be showing is similar capacity vs. similar capacity. So, for example, a 512GB Samsung 850 Pro with OP to leave it with 400GB usable, versus and Intel 750 with 400GB usable.
I also think it would be good testing policy to test ALL SSDs twice, once with no OP, and once with 50% overprovisioning, running them through all the tests with 0% and 50% OP. The point is not that 50% OP is typical, but rather that it will reveal the best and worst case performance that the SSD is capable of. The reason I say 50% rather than 20% or 25% is that the optimal OP varies from SSD to SSD, especially among models that already come with significant OP. So, to be sure that you OP enough that you reach optimal performance, and to provide historical comparison tests, it is best just to arbitrarily choose 50% OP since that should be more than enough to achieve optimal sustained performance on any SSD.