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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knweiss - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link
Kristian, you wrote "for up to 4GB/s of bandwidth with PCIe 3.0 (although in real world the maximum bandwidth is about 3.2GB/s due to PCIe inefficiency)". Is this really true? PCIe 2.0 uses 8b/10b encoding with 20% bandwidth overhead which would match your numbers. However, PCIe 3.0 uses 128b/130b encoding with only 1.54% bandwidth overhead. Could you please explain the inefficiency you mentioned? Thanks in advance!DanNeely - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link
The real world number includes the bandwidth consumed by PCIe packet headers, NVME packet headers, NVME command messages, etc. Those are over and above the penalty from the encoding scheme on the bus itself.IntelUser2000 - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link
The 4GB bandwidth takes into account the encoding scheme.Each lane of v1 PCI-Express had 2.5GT/s so with 8b/10b encoding you end up with 2.5G/10 = 250MB/s. Quadruple that for four lanes and you end up with 1GB/s.
v2 of PCI-Express is double that and v3 of PCI-Express is further double that and there is the 4GB number.
aggrokalle - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link
i'm interrested in this as well...so how many nand-channels got the 1.2tb and 400gb version Kristian?tspacie - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link
Was there an approximate release date?gforce007 - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link
When will these be available for purchase? Also I have a m.2 slot on my motherboard (z10PE-D8 WS) Id rather utilize the 2.5 15mm form factor. I am a bit confused. I dont think that board has SFF-8639. Is there an adapter. Will that affect performance? I assume so and by how much?knweiss - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link
The motherboard (host) end of the cable has a square-shaped SFF-8643(!) connector. E.g. ASUS ships an M.2 adapter card for the X99 Sabertooth that offers a suitable port. SFF-8639 is on the drive's end.emn13 - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link
That endurance number is scarily low for a 1.2TB drive. 70GB a day for 5 years - thats about 128 TB of writes total, and that's just 100 drive writes! Put another way, at around 1GB/sec (which this drive can easily do), you'd reach those 100 drive writes in just 36 hours.Of course, that's an extremely intensive workload, but I sure hope this is just intel trying to avoid giving any warrantee rather than an every remotely realistic assessment of the drives capabilities.
p1esk - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link
This is a consumer drive. What's your use case where you write more than 70GB a day?juhatus - Friday, April 3, 2015 - link
Raw 4k video and its not even close to being enough.At 4K (4096 x 2160) it registers 1697 Mbps which equals 764 GB/hour of 4K video footage. A single camera large Hollywood production can often shoot 100 hours of footage. That’s 76 TB of 4K ProRes 4444 XQ footage.
The upcoming David Fincher film GONE GIRL crept up on 500 hours of raw footage during its multi camera 6K RED Dragon production. That equates to roughly 315 TB of RED 6K (4:1) footage. Shit just got real for data management and post production workflows.