Intel SSD 750 PCIe SSD Review: NVMe for the Client
by Kristian Vättö on April 2, 2015 12:00 PM ESTSequential Read Performance
Our sequential tests are conducted in the same manner as our random IO tests. Each queue depth is tested for three minutes without any idle time in between the tests and the IOs are 4K aligned similar to what you would experience in a typical desktop OS.
In sequential read performance the SM951 keeps its lead. While the SSD 750 reaches up to 2.75GB/s at high queue depths, the scaling at small queue depths is very poor. I think this is an area where Intel should have put in a little more effort because it would translate to better performance in more typical workloads.
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Sequential Write Performance
Sequential write testing differs from random testing in the sense that the LBA span is not limited. That's because sequential IOs don't fragment the drive, so the performance will be at its peak regardless.
The SSD 750 is faster in sequential writes than the SM951, but the difference isn't all that big when you take into account that the SSD 750 has more than twice the amount of NAND. The SM951 did have some throttling issues as you can see in the graph below and I bet that with a heatsink and proper cooling the two would be quite identical because at queue depth of 1 the SSD 750 is only marginally faster. It's again a bit disappointing that the SSD 750 isn't that well optimized for sequential IO because there's prcatically no scaling at all and the drive maxes out at ~1350MB/s.
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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?