You may not know it, but over the past few years we as gamers and enthusiasts have been smack dab in the middle of a bit of a revolution. Sure games don’t seem to push hardware as much as they used too and the focus has been on higher resolutions. But on the storage front performance has been improving with leaps and bounds. Here at LanOC our first hard drive review came about around the same time that the first consumer SSDs were hitting the market. When tested that hard drive saw an average read speed of about 75MB/s. Our first SSD review a few months later put down an impressive 214.6 MB/s. After that we saw speeds increase to 300 and then recently to around 550 MB/s. PCIe drives have performed better than that but none of them promise to put down numbers like todays review. Today I’m going to check out Intel’s first consumer focused PCIe drive that happens to also use NVMe.

Product Name: Intel SSD 750 Series PCIe

Review Sample Provided by: Intel

Written by: Wes

Pictures by: Wes

 

Specifications

Specifications

400G and 1.2TB

Connection type

PCIe Gen3 x4

Specifications

-2.5 inch Form Factor

15mm z-height

8639 compatible connector

-Add-in Card Form Factor

Half-height, half-length

Single slot x4 connector

Performance

Seq R/W: Up to 2400/1200 MB/s
4K Random Read: Up to 440K
4K Random Write: Up to 290K

Latency (average sequential)

Read: 20 µs (TYP)
Write: 20 µs (TYP)

Components

Intel 20nm MLC NAND Flash Memory

Operating System Support

Windows 7 64 bit
Windows 8 64 bit

Windows 8.1 64 bit
UEFI 2.3.1 or later

Reliability

Uncorrectable Bit Error Rate (UBER):
1 sector per 10ⁱ⁶ bit read

Power

2.5-inch: 3.3V and 12V Supply Rail
AIC: 3.3V and 12V Supply Rail
Enhanced power-loss data protection
Active/Idle (TYP): 25W/4W (TYP)

Compliance

NVM Express 1.0
PCI Express Base Specification Rev 3.0
SFF 8639 Enterprise SSD Form Factor Version 1.0a
PCI Express Card Electro-Mechanical (CEM) Specification Rev 2.0

Certifications and Declarations

UL, CE, C-Tick, BSMI, KCC, Microsoft WHQL, VCCI

Endurance Rating

70 GB Writes Per Day
Up to 219 TBW (Terabytes Written)

Temperature Specification

Operating:
-AIC:0 to 55 C
-2.5-inch: 0-70C
Non-Operating: -55 to 95C
Temperature Monitoring

Weight

AIC: up to 195 gm
2.5-inch: up to 125 gm

Shock

2.5-inch: 1,000 G/0.5msec
AIC: 50 G Trapezoidal, 170 in/s

Altitude (Simulated)

Operating: -1,000 to 10,000 ft
Non-Operating -1,000 to 40,000 ft

Product Ecological Compliance

RoHS

 


A quick look at the 750 Series

While what I will be testing today is the PCIe card, this launch is an interesting one because they are also launching a 2.5 inch version as well. What makes it so interesting though is that all of the specification and performance numbers of the PCIe drive also apply to the 2.5 inch drive. This is because the 2.5 drive still connects via PCI Express using the SFF-8639 connector. Intel is introducing this form factor because a lot of the OEMs would like to have an option for ITX builds. As a big LANrig fan, I can completely support this. In fact I would love to get my hands on one to try out in a future build. It’s great to see them keeping SFF builds in mind!

So both drives are available in just two sizes. You can get a 400GB model and then a 1.2TB model. Today I will be testing the 1.2TB model. I know personally I would love to see a third capacity in between the two current capacities. With 480 starting to become the norm the 400 is a little small in comparison but jumping to the 1.2TB is a huge step.

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So what is the big fuss about NVMe? Well NVMe stands for “Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface Specification”. Intel and a long list of other manufactures have been working together for years to bring NVMe to the market. In order for everything to work, not only do you have to have drives, but you also have to have motherboards that support it as well. Intel has worked with all of the manufactures to make sure that the Z97 and X99 boards completely support NVMe. A lot of the previous chipsets like X79 should support it as well but it will depend on if the manufacture added support via a BIOS update, a lot of the older boards are End Of Life and with that don’t get updates. So before you consider going this direction make sure your PC will support it. The short version of what NVMe does is give your SSD a direct connection to your CPU through PCIe giving low latency and high bandwidth. This is a drastic change from SATA where you connect your SSD, it connects to the SATA controller that then talks to your CPU. Cut out the middleman. 

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Here is a peak at the 1.5 inch drive as well. One side looks like a normal SSD but the backside does have a heatsink integrated to keep things cool. The data connection can be plugged into a M.2 adapter then run to the drive.

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Our Testing Procedures and Test Rig

Procedures

PCMark

Disk benchmark

Anvil’s Storage Utilities

Test 1 - SSD Benchmark set to 46% compression. Use Read and Write numbers from the 4K QD16 IOPS results
Test 2 – Threaded QD Read run at 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, and 128 with a file size of 4K and a compression setting of 46%

Test 3 - Threaded QD Write run at 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, and 64 with a file size of 4K and a compression setting of 46%

CrystalDiskMark

Read Seq and Write Seq tests

AS SSD 

Copy Benchmark with ISO, Program, and Game results

Passmark 

Advanced disk benchmark file server, Web Server, Workstation, and Database benchmarks

Test Rig

Motherboard

Asus X99-Deluxe

Live Pricing

Ram

Corsair Vengeance LPX 2666MHz DDR4 4x4GB

Live Pricing

CPU

Intel i7-5960X Haswell-E

Live Pricing

Heatsink

Noctua NH-U12S heatsink

Live Pricing

Power Supply

Thermaltake Grand 850W PSU

Live Pricing

Video Card

Nvidia GTX 780 Video Card

Live Pricing

Test Bench

Dimastech Test Bench

Live Pricing

 


Photos and Breakdown

So normally we would take a quick look at the packaging but in this case being a pre-launch device the 750 Series came to us in a sealed static bag with the full height PCI slot cover as well. I will say though, packaging or no packaging, when the drive came in I was a kid again for a short period of time digging into it all to get my hands on the drive.

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Once out of its bag. I could finally get a good look at the drive. While the 750 Series shares a LOT with Intel’s P3700 enterprise PCIe SSD. That said the 750 Series went a much lighter silver color where the P3700 went with a black strip over the front. The drive is a half-height device to make sure it supports small builds when needed but it does come with a full height PCI slot for fitting the drive in your new gaming PC. To get things hooked up you will have to hook it up to a PCIe x4 slot or larger, this shouldn’t be an issue though because most PCs these days have a bunch of extra PCIe x16 slots, even if a lot of them only have the bandwidth to push x8 or even x4. This still works out because the 750 Series only needs x4. All of the needed power is pulled over the PCIe slot as well, so you won’t have to worry about hooking up external power.

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Typically, I would pull the entire drive apart but while digging into the 750 Series had trouble pulling the heatsink off without risking damage to the drive itself. So that leaves us officially with a photo of the backside but I will also still go over what is inside. Right above the PCIe connection you will find the 18-channel NVMe-capable controller. This is the exact same controller found in the P3700 enterprise drive. In fact, really the only difference you will be able to see between the two drives at the PCB level is there are four missing NAND chips. We can actually see this in the photo below of the back of the PCB. This is partially due to overprovisioning that enterprise drives see but also because the P3700 was available in larger 1.6TB and 2TB models.

image 5

Just like the P3700 enterprise drive that the 750 Series is based on, we have a heatsink that runs the length of the SSD to keep everything cool. It is a little over a half-inch thick and has eight main fins that stick up. It is interesting though because Intel puts a stick on panel right on top of the fins to get all of the branding on the drive covering up a lot of the potential airflow that the drive could see. That said, it just needs a little bit of cooling to prevent issues if it gets tucked in between two hot video cards.

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Before jumping into testing I did have to swap to the full height PCI slot cover, here is a shot of the drive with it.

image 10

 


Performance

The only way to find out how good the 750 Series really is of course is to run it through our benchmark suite. To help better show the performance regular readers will notice that I changed the way we display our graphs slightly and I also went through and added another benchmark and adjusted how we track our PCMark 8 benchmark as well. Before we get to those results, let’s take a look at the CrystalDiskMark results. One thing is very clear just from a quick glance of the results. The Intel drive is worlds apart from the standard SATA 3 SSDs that we have tested in the past. In results like the sequential test I saw almost 1700MB/s on the read speeds and over 1300MB/s on the write speeds. This isn’t exactly what Intel was promising, but I will get into that more later. Both are still extremely impressive results.

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For AS SSD I changed up our graphs slightly as well. I stacked all three results to focus more on the overall speed of a drive rather than any one specific result. In a lot of cases one drive might be faster in one test but slower in the other two. This new way of looking at the results better show what drives are faster overall. That said, no shocks here, the Intel 750 Series stomped the competition, especially in the ISO test with a crazy .6 of a second file transfer. The next closest result took 2.21 seconds!

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In our Passmark results the Intel drive once again blew away everything else tested. In just the file server result alone the 750 Series pulled 1623MB/s, more than any other drive did in all four tests combined.

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I added PCMark 8 results to our storage reviews about a month ago but at the time I used the overall storage score. I was very disappointed that the overall storage score didn’t truly show the different between drives so from now on we will be using the storage bandwidth result. This is the overall bandwidth that the benchmark see’s over the entire hour+ long benchmark. In the case of the Intel 750 Series its results are twice as fast as the SATA competition. The 522.25MB/s result may seem slow, but it is in line with the results from the other drives. I suspect that the downtime in between each benchmark lowers this number in comparison to the drives potential sustained numbers.  

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In Anvil’s Storage Utilities I ran the 750 Series through 4K QD 16 read and write IOPS benchmarks. We can really see just how far ahead this drive is here. What I found interesting though is that the read speeds lag behind the write speeds in this test. Even so the read speed IOPS at a queue depth of 16 is still higher than the read and writes combined for most of the drives tested.

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So by now you have to be wondering about the lack of any results showing the 2400MB/s read speed (we actually saw higher than the promised 120MB/s write speeds). Well Intel provided their own instructions with the drive on how they got their results. This included a full hour of drive prep in IOMeter and then running a full sequential benchmark at 128 Kb with a queue depth of 32. I can confirm that when testing using these instructions I actually saw a read speed of just over 2700MB/s and a write speed of over 1400MB/s, super impressive numbers!

The benchmark they provided is a fairly standard benchmark when looking at enterprise drives, but we don’t test a lot of enterprise drives so it was lacking in our benchmark suite. Well I’m not a fan of just taking a company’s test and including it in our benchmarks because this can sometimes lead to benchmarks that favor a specific manufacture. It did however expose a hole in our benchmarks, specifically we don’t test a rand of queue depths. So what I did is go back and retest a few of our recent drives and the Intel 750 Series using Anvil’s Storage Utilities Threaded QD benchmark. I ran both read and write benchmarks starting at a QD of 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, and 128(on the read only). Each test was run with a block size of 4K and this uses the same 46% compression that I run on our other Anvil benchmark.

So how did our new benchmark come out? Well with these results we can see that the Intel 750 Series handles a higher queue depth a LOT better than a standard SATA drive. This is partially due to the new NVMe connection that allows more parallel activity over the PCIe interface. This is why the 750 Series using an 18-channel controller where the most recent SATA SSD I tested uses 8. With these results we can also see why the write speeds were higher in the previously results. The 750 Series ramps up quicker on the writes but peaks where the read results keep going.

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The results still don’t match the numbers promised by Intel but at closer. I did take go back and test the 750 with a 128QD with a block size of 128K and then 512K blocks as well. Here I did see 2,241 and 2,454 respectively on the read speeds. This drive is a monster!

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Overall and Final Verdict

The Intel 750 Series is a really interesting set of drives. I suspect a lot of people are going to be baffled the first time they see one of the 2.5 inch drives. At this point, most enthusiasts and gamers have seen or heard of PCIe drives, but a PCIe drive in a 2.5 form factor is interesting. I think it is a great addition though, as someone who builds far too many ITX builds having the option that leaves my PCIe slot open for a video card is still a requirement. Most ITX boards already have M.2 slots and at least a few even went as far as to make sure their M.2 slot had 4 lanes. A great example of this is the latest Asus Impact, they actually delayed its launch to change things around to fit 4 lanes to the M.2.

So how did the 1.2 TB PCIe model that we tested today perform? Well without a question it blew everything we have ever tested in the past out of the water. Even saying that doesn’t really give the drive justice. When testing at a high queue depth I saw results that were a 525% increase over the next fastest drive! Wrap your head around that one. This happened in every single benchmark, the 750 Series is without a doubt a monster. That said in all of our testing I did struggle to get even close to the results Intel suggests the drive is capable. I was able to see that and higher when doing specific testing, but my concern is that the drive does still tend to favor very high queue depth situations that I don’t think nearly anyone in a consumer or even enthusiast setting will run into. I’m not saying this isn’t a monster drive, but keep in mind that day to day you are going to be leaving a lot on the table, unless you are using this in a high workload server that is.

No surprises with the warranty, being designed after their enterprise drive Intel was able to put a solid 5 year warranty on the 750 Series. Something I didn’t talk about but the move to NVMe also means a little less load on the CPU when you are hitting the drive extremely hard with high IOPS. They say that you can see around a 36% increase in those situations. On the downside I was a little bummed that there isn’t a third model available. I think the 400GB model is good for some people, but a lot of enthusiasts will be looking for a little more but not as much as the 1.2TB offers. A 600 or 800 GB model would be great. This is especially important when we consider pricing as well. Here is the current breakdown on Amazon.

400GB $389 (Amazon)

1.2TB $1029 (Amazon)

Both are priced well when you take into account price per gig but the high capacity of the 1.2TB drive hits the wallet realty hard! So is this the drive for you? Well if you are looking at this as an upgrade you first need to make sure that it is going to work at all in your build. X99 and Z97 builds are good to go though. If you need the absolute fastest this is the way to go though. I know if my builds budget allowed I would be looking at one! 

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Author Bio
garfi3ld
Author: garfi3ldWebsite: http://lanoc.org
Editor-in-chief
You might call him obsessed or just a hardcore geek. Wes's obsession with gaming hardware and gadgets isn't anything new, he could be found taking things apart even as a child. When not poking around in PC's he can be found playing League of Legends, Awesomenauts, or Civilization 5 or watching a wide variety of TV shows and Movies. A car guy at heart, the same things that draw him into tweaking cars apply when building good looking fast computers. If you are interested in writing for Wes here at LanOC you can reach out to him directly using our contact form.

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garfi3ld's Avatar
garfi3ld replied the topic: #36562 02 Apr 2015 18:59
Today I take a look at a monster of an SSD from Intel. It is available in both PCIe and 2.5 inch models so it will fit in your main PC or your LANrig as well!
Sideout's Avatar
Sideout replied the topic: #36572 03 Apr 2015 19:40
Maybe Intel will give us one to throw in the LANOC server for the lan parties??!!!! (Hint hint wish wish???)

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