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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mmrezaie - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link
finally it has started, although I wont budge now. maybe next generation.blanarahul - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link
Hey Kristian, I read that the 1.2 TB model uses 84 dies. But that's not a multiple of 18. So what gives? Is it running in 14 channel mode or something?blanarahul - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link
Okay so it has 86 dies. But now it's even more confusing. Aren't they supposed be multiples of number of channels the controller is using?SunLord - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link
Its likely 18 channels so 4 probably only address 4 dies while the 14 other channels handle 5woggs - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link
yepTyrDonar - Friday, April 10, 2015 - link
Controllers don't have to operate on a specific multiple of the number of dies. That's just a coincidence as to how we've seen them so far on most SSD's. They can operate with varying priorities and asymmetrically. Further, more than 1 channel can address the same die in different intervals/priorities. As controllers become more and more complex, this kind of assymetrical operation will become more common, unfortunately this is correlated with increasing number of total dies and lower reliability.huaxshin - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link
Will there be any M2 SSDs from Intel with NVMe? Some notebooks, and desktops, have routed PCIe to M2 slots where its the only place its available.blanarahul - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link
No.DigitalFreak - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link
Not with this controller. Maybe down the road.bgelfand - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link
I suspect this drive is not for the current z97 chip set, but will realize its potential with the Z170 chipset (Sunrise Point) due for release in the second half of this year with Skylake. The Z170 chipset has 20 PCIe 3.0 lanes and DMI 3.0 (8 GB/s) bus interface.It should be a very interesting second half of the year - Skylake CPU, Sunrise Point chipsets, and Windows 10.