Intel P3700 NVMe SSD Installed In a Win 8.1 Consumer PC – Drivers Benched

COMPARING NVME DRIVERS

The TSSDR SSD Optimization Guide is one of the most popular in the world and one of its first recommendations is to ensure your drivers are up to date.  Our installation of the Intel P3700 NVMe SSD was a perfect example of this as there is a native driver in Windows 8.1, and another was supplied with the P3700 SSD.  Let’s Compare!

ATTO DISK BENCHMARK VER. 2.47

ATTO Disk Benchmark is perhaps one of the oldest benchmarks going and is definitely the main staple for manufacturer performance specifications. ATTO uses RAW or compressible data and, for our benchmarks, we use a set length of 256mb and test both the read and write performance of various transfer sizes ranging from 0.5 to 8192kb. Manufacturers prefer this method of testing as it deals with raw (compressible) data rather than random (includes incompressible data) which, although more realistic, results in lower performance results.

STOCK

INTEL

Taking a close look at these ATTO results, we can see that write performance kicks in much faster with the Intel driver, more than doubling the write performance at the 4K and 8K level.  This plays a key role in what we might see at the OS level in typical use.

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. Stock NVMe driver results are displayed on the left while the Intel NVMe driver results are on the right.

These initial AS SSD results are an excellent example of understanding the task at hand when configuring your storage device.  The stock driver on the left displays much higher 4K-64Thrd write speeds and subsequent scores, whereas the Intel NVMe driver results provide us with far superior high sequential throughput.

Similarly, take a look at the P3700 NVMe 4K-64Thrd write IOPS on the left.  I don’t think anyone expected to see 632151 IOPS from this SSD, including Intel themselves.

Last but not least, we take a look at the AS SSD Copy Benchmark where the Intel NVMe SSD driver has a clear break on the stock driver found in Windows 8.