Intel 750 PCIe SSD Review (1.2TB) – 1st Consumer 2.4GB/s NVMe SSD Set To Change The Industry

CRYSTAL DISK BENCHMARK VER. 3.0 X64

Crystal Disk Benchmark is used to measure read and write performance through sampling of random data which is, for the most part, incompressible. Performance is virtually identical, regardless of data sample so we have included only that using random data samples.

Just as we seen in other PCIe SSD reviews, Crystal Disk Mark results show lower than expected results. Here we see 1.6GB/s read and almost 1.3GB/s write. Taking a closer look at 4K performance we can see it achieved 43MB/s read and nearly 260MB/s write! Its 4K write performance is almost double that of the higher performing SATA SSDs on the market.

AS SSD BENCHMARK VER 1.7

The toughest benchmark available for solid state drives is AS SSD as it relies solely on incompressible data samples when testing performance.  For the most part, AS SSD tests can be considered the ‘worst case scenario’ in obtaining data transfer speeds and many enthusiasts like AS SSD for their needs. Transfer speeds are displayed on the left with IOPS results on the right.

Again, with AS SSD we see slightly lesser performance than the rated spec, however, the Total Score of 3809 points is very impressive. Here the Intel 750 was able to achieve 2,262MB/s sequential read and nearly 1,300MB/s write speeds. Looking at 4K performance it was able to reach almost 40MB/s read and 200MB/s write. During the 4K-64Thrd test it hit 357K IOPS read and 260K IOPS write and latency was on par with the rated spec at 0.015ms read and 0.020ms write.

In the AS SSD Copy benchmark we can see some very good performance. So good in fact that it is better than the copy performance that we have seen from its DC P3700 bother.

ANVIL STORAGE UTILITIES PROFESSIONAL

Anvil’s Storage Utilities (ASU) are the most complete test bed available for the solid state drive today.  The benchmark displays test results for, not only throughput but also, IOPS and Disk Access Times.  Not only does it have a preset SSD benchmark, but also, it has included such things as endurance testing and threaded I/O read, write and mixed tests, all of which are very simple to understand and use in our benchmark testing.

Taking a look at performance results from Anvil Storage Utilities we can see that overall, they are similar to that of our other tests. Let’s move on to Iometer and see what we get.

IOMETER

Iometer is an I/O subsystem measurement and characterization tool for single and clustered systems. It was originally developed by the Intel Corporation however, they discontinued work on the program. In 2003 it was re-launched by an international group of individuals who are now continuously improving, porting and extend the product that is now widely used within the industry. This is a very powerful benchmarking tool and we are just now starting to integrate it into our consumer reviews.

In Iometer we first preconditioned the SSD with sequential writes for 1hr.  After that we recorded the speeds for an additional 20 minutes, then graphed the last 10 minutes above. As you can see, the performance is quite impressive. The Intel 750 reached an average of 2,570MB/s read and 1,197MB/s write! Looking at the consistency across the time span we can see that it is fairly consistency and offers writes ranging from 1.1GB/s minimum to 1.3GB/s max.

Next we ran 4K random read and write workloads for 20 minutes each and graphed the last 10 minutes above. The average read IOPS we achieved were over the rated 440K at 462,692 IOPS. Looking at the write IOPS the 1.2TB Intel 750 averaged 289,149 IOPS. Very close to the rated 290K value.  We can also see that there are some dips over the 10 minute span, however, overall performance is very good as it quickly jumps back up to ~260K-300K over a few seconds.  This type of performance is definitively far above that of typical consumer workloads and even that of most prosumer workloads.