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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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" ?