Intel 750 PCIe SSD Review (400GB)

CRYSTAL DISK BENCHMARK VER. 4.0.3 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.

In Crystal Disk Mark we see reads reaching up to 3.3GB/s and writes reaching over 1GB/s again. The 3.3GB/s read performance could be a fluke as this is a newer version of Crystal Disk Mark than we have used in the past and the previous 1.2TB Intel 750 only reached 1.6GB/s. 4K performance is also very strong reaching almost 49MB/s for 4K read and nearly 350MB/s for 4K write. Overall, the performance is quite impressive, let’s see how it compares in our other benchmarks.

AS SSD BENCHMARK VER 1.8

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.

Our next benchmark, AS SSD, shows a very good score. A Total Score of 3403 points was achieved, about 400 points below the 1.2TB model. The Intel 750 400GB reached 2,041MB/s read and 1,000MB/s write speeds. 4K performance is a bit less than shown in Crystal Disk Mark, now at 43MB/s read and 203MB/s write. During the 4K-64Thrd test it hit 357K IOPS read, just as its 1.2TB bother and 171K IOPS write. Latency is also within spec at 0.016ms read and 0.020ms write.

The AS SSD Copy benchmark shows some impressive scores also, though a bit less than its 1.2TB 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.

The 400GB Intel 750 showed very similar performance in Anvil Storage Utilities as well, with a total overall score of 11,492 points.  Sequential reads are a bit shy of spec at 1,956MB/s and sequential writes are a bit higher at 1,008MB/s. Random reads reached over 152K IOPS and writes up to 234K IOPS.

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.

In order to attain the max IOPS we set 4KB random read and write workloads at a QD of 128 and tested for a 10 minute span. We can see that read IOPS averaged 443K while write averaged 36K. After about 30 seconds performance dropped off from 250K down to 20-25K IOPS, which is extremely good for a consumer SSD. For comparison most other SSDs will drop to around 10K.

Next we measured sequential performance and got an average read of about 2.4GB/s and average write speed of 1GB/s. The consistency of both random and sequential write performance is very good.