We've been saying it for years: Serial ATA-based solid-state drives (SSDs) are becoming increasingly similar in terms of performance—especially read speeds—as drives smash up against the wall of the interface's theoretical maximum of 600MB per second. To make a material difference, something fundamental has needed to change for some time now.
Some SSD makers have attempted to get around this SATA speed limit with workarounds. A prominent example is Samsung's RAPID mode software, which, in its current iteration, reserves up to a quarter of your computer's RAM essentially as a super-fast cache. That looks great in formal benchmarking scenarios, but the real-world performance impact of this (and similar approaches) is only modest, though. The fact is, all SATA-based SSDs are limited not only by the physical interface, but by the system-level software interface, too.
Up until now, consumer SSDs have all relied on the venerable Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) to communicate between the drive and the rest of the system. That even applies to drives such as the Plextor M6e M.2 (G256M6e) we tested last year, which connects via the emerging M.2 physical interface to the PCI Express bus. PCI Express has much more bandwidth than SATA, but even it has limits, given its current AHCI-reliant implementation for consumer SSDs. (For a primer on M.2 drives and the background issues, check out our roundup Buying the Best M.2 Solid-State Drive.)
AHCI has been around since 2004, but age isn't its biggest problem. It was built to accommodate hard drives, which have high latency, due to their rotating media and physical read/write heads. But SSDs, partially because they have no moving parts, have low latency, and they can accommodate many more read/write commands at once. (The measure of how many commands a drive has in the hopper is known as its "queue depth"; for more SSD jargon explained, check out Buying a Solid-State Drive: 20 Terms You Need to Know.) Clearly, a new internal, system-level interface is needed that's built for modern computing and for the strengths of current and future solid-state storage.
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Enter Non-Volatile Memory Express, or NVMe for short.
NVMe is a new logical-device interface standard designed for SSDs and PCI Express. It was developed in cooperation with more than 65 companies, including storage-industry and core-system heavyweights such as Intel, Samsung, SanDisk, and Microsoft.
Intel and Samsung both released NVMe-based drives for enterprise in 2013 and 2014, but the Intel SSD 750 Series is the first NVMe-equipped drive we've seen that's aimed at consumers. Now don't read "consumers" as "mainstream consumers": It's definitely not a mainstream drive, as evidenced by its pricing ($380 for the 400GB model, and $1,029 for the 1.2TB model we tested). However, given that the drive is faster, several times over, than any SATA-based SSD we've tested, the SSD 750 Series' prices are actually pretty reasonable. (We'd also like to see a 750GB or 800GB option for about $750, but that's a modest quibble.)
As we'll see later in our testing, the SSD 750 Series is without a doubt the fastest single drive you can buy unless you start investigating ones meant for enterprise use or in data centers. But it's also strictly for desktop-PC users, due to its high power consumption and cooling requirements. They are high for a storage drive, at least; they're nothing like the power demands of, say, a high-end graphics card. But they preclude the use of the 2.5-inch drive in laptops—for that and several other reasons.
Intel offers the drive in two form factors: as a PCI Express add-in card (akin to a small video card), as well as an unorthodox 2.5-inch drive. The 2.5-inch drive has an unusual internal Mini-SAS connector that, at the moment at least, only plugs in to a couple of power-user Asus motherboards via a kludgy converter called the "Hyper Kit." (The Hyper Kit is an adapter that resembles an M.2 SSD and screws down into an M.2 slot on your desktop's motherboard.)
We received the 2.5-inch version of the drive, along with the Hyper Kit. And having tested it, we can say one thing with certainty: It's indeed crazy-fast. You might even say it's stupid-fast. But we can also say: Unless absolutely necessary, you're better off opting for the PCI Express card version of this drive, or waiting for motherboards to show up with a native Mini-SAS connector onboard, so you don't have to deal with an adapter kit that so far only works with a couple Asus motherboards. (Known more technically as an SFF-8643 interface on the motherboard end, the internal Mini-SAS port is commonly seen only in enterprise-class storage environments.)
Beyond that connector issue, though, even if you opt for the PCI Express card version of the drive, you may have to wait or go to some measures to use it. Whichever form factor you choose, the drive is supported only by Intel's very latest system-level chipsets, the X99 and Z97, and the board you're installing it on will need to have a BIOS update that supports the NVMe specification.
This is beyond-cutting-edge tech, to be sure—and at the same time one of the most impressive single-shot leaps forward in storage speed we've ever seen. But unless you truly want and need the fastest storage available, you may want to wait a bit, until Intel and other drive makers round off a few of the painfully sharp edges. Chances are, in any case, that the system hardware you have in place won't give you any choice.
Design, Installation, and Features
As we mentioned in the previous section, the Intel SSD 750 Series comes in two form factors, in 400GB and 1.2TB capacities in each. The one we expect the hard-core, speed-freak target market will opt for in greater numbers is the half-height add-in card. (A full-width bracket is also included with the drive.) Installing this drive should be fairly simple, as it plugs into a PCI Express slot, just like a graphics card.
The drive also comes in a 2.5-inch form factor, much like that of a standard SATA-based SSD. However, due to a chunky heat sink on the top, the 2.5-inch version of the drive is about twice as thick as a standard SSD, at 15mm...
It won't fit in a vertically tight drive bay, nor, in some cases, where the SSD is mounted behind the motherboard, between the case side and the back of the motherboard tray. You'll need to afford it a 2.5-inch bay with some clearance above it.
The cable that comes with the 2.5-inch version of the SSD 750 Series drive has the Mini-SAS connector at the motherboard end—it looks like a beefed-up, rearranged SATA connector, or perhaps an auxiliary power-supply connection. As mentioned earlier, at this writing at least, no consumer motherboards were available that included this connector natively on the board. The other end, which attaches to the drive, will be unfamiliar to most. The connector there is called SFF-8639, and it has also only been seen on enterprise-class storage...
It's actually an evolution of the drive-side connector used on SAS drives. To an average upgrader's eyes, it looks like a wider version of the connector you see on SATA drives, but it also has a pigtail connector for additional power delivery. You'll need to route one of your system's blade-style SATA power leads to the pigtail.
Deciphering the Hyper Kit
So, assuming you went with the 2.5-inch drive, what can you plug it into? One new-for-2015 X99-series motherboard from Asus, the TUF Sabertooth X99, now comes with the Hyper Kit adapter we mentioned earlier. It adds a Mini-SAS/SFF-8643 connector to your system through the board's M.2 slot. The Hyper Kit is an M.2-drive-shaped circuit board; it screws into the M.2 slot and has the Mini-SAS connector mounted parallel to its surface…
This is a complicated arrangement, though, for a few reasons. At the time of this writing in late April 2015, the Hyper Kit had been validated for use only with the TUF Sabertooth X99 and a few Asus Republic of Gamers X99-chipset boards. Asus was not able to get one of these TUF Sabertooth X99 boards to us in time for this review; instead, we were provided with one of the Hyper Kits by itself, along with a beta BIOS update for the Asus X99-Deluxe motherboard. (This is the same motherboard that we reviewed last year when the X99 platform and the Intel Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition "Haswell-E" rolled out.) The BIOS update enabled the Hyper Kit to work with this board in the same way it would have on the TUF Sabertooth X99, making the SSD 750 Series bootable and the board able to leverage NVMe.
So, at least in the short term, there will be an extremely limited selection of motherboards that will work with the 2.5-inch version of the Intel SSD 750 Series, due to the need for both Hyper Kit compatibility and an appropriate BIOS update. Also, even if Hyper Kit support gets extended to more Asus boards, and competing conversion kits become available from other board vendors for their boards, you may need to be aware of potential issues with the connector. (When we wrote this, MSI had just announced an "M.2 to Turbo Mini-SAS" adapter for its own boards that looked like its own version of the Asus Hyper Kit.)
The caution? The SFF-8643 connector in the Hyper Kit is fairly tall (about 15mm), and given that the M.2 slots on some boards sit nestled among the graphics-card slots, installing this cable-and-adapter contraption could block the installation of a large graphics card in a nearby motherboard slot. Given that this drive is aimed at serious enthusiasts, many of whom are the exact kind of buyers likely to opt for multiple-graphics-card setups, the M.2-to-SFF-8643 conversion kit, at least in its current form, might be problematic.
Those are our main concerns with the Hyper Kit, but having dealt with it ourselves (wrangled with it, would be more accurate), let's just say it's a little clunky, too. The Intel-provided cable was thick and stiff, and on our Asus X99-Deluxe board, the M.2 slot actually uses a metal bracket to mount the drive at right angles to the board, not parallel to it, as you can see here...
That made the torque applied by the cable that much more worrisome. Again: Most users should opt for the PCI Express card version of the SSD 750 Series drive, or wait for a better solution for connecting the 2.5-inch version. We would not be surprised to see a variety of motherboards with native SFF-8643 connectors announced at Computex 2015, in June.
Before we get into the drive's specs—which will cause those who crave speed to flex-react and reach for their wallets—it's worth pointing out some of the current caveats with the SSD 750 Series drive, and NVMe in general.
First off, unless your motherboard still has that fresh-from-the-factory smell, it will almost certainly need a BIOS update before it will recognize an NVMe drive—and you need to be sure one is (or will come) available. In the case of our Asus board, we had to activate a specific "Hyper Kit mode" in the BIOS to get the drive up and running off the Kit.
The good news on that front is that most major motherboard makers seem to be moving swiftly on this score, rolling out updates to their new and recent boards. Intel notes that it laid a lot of the groundwork with motherboard makers and BIOS developers to ease this transition—especially, in tweaks to make NVMe drives like the SSD 750 Series bootable. But, as stated earlier, Intel guarantees support for only certain Z97- and X99-based motherboards.
So, if your board is more than a year or so old, you may need to replace it or build a new PC—not a trivial upgrade, by any means. (X99 boards and CPUs aren't cheap, either, and you'll need to factor in the cost for some new DDR4 memory with that platform.) You may be able to get the drive working on an older board, but there's also a good chance it won't work as a bootable drive—only as secondary storage. And even if the drive is recognized by your older motherboard, if the board doesn't feature support for PCI Express 3.0 lanes, the drive won't have the bandwidth to run at its full potential, anyway.
The Specifications
The good news is that while the two form factors of the SSD 750 Series—the PCI Express card, and the 2.5-incher—differ greatly in how they look and how you install them, their rated performance is the same. Rather than rattle off a full list of specs, here's a chart, direct from Intel, that shows the key specs for the 400GB and 1.2TB versions of the drive…
If you don't pay close attention to SATA SSD speeds, the above chart may not mean much to you. But, for comparison's sake, the higher capacities of the Samsung SSD 850 Pro, one of the best mainstream SATA SSDs currently available, have rated maximum sequential-read speeds of 550MB per second and sequential-write speeds of 520MB per second. The 1.2TB Intel SSD 750 Series drive (the model we tested) is rated to read large files at more than 4.3 times the speed of the Samsung drive, and write about 2.3 times the Samsung drive's speed.
Random read and write speeds (expressed here in IOPS, or inputs and outputs per second) are very impressive on Intel's new drive, as well. The maximum IOPS listed for Samsung's SSD 850 Pro are 100,000 IOPS and 90,000 IOPS, for reads and writes, respectively. On paper at least, the 1.2TB Intel drive is 4.4 times faster than the best 1TB SATA drive we've tested in random writes, and more than 3.2 times faster than the same drive in random reads. Considering the minor speed upticks we've seen from SATA drives in recent years, the Intel drive's rated speeds are nothing less than revolutionary—it's like pouring nitro straight into your storage subsystem.
Keep in mind, though, that the Intel drive uses much more power than a standard SATA drive to achieve these speeds. The Samsung SSD 850 Pro, for example, consumes about 3 watts when active, while the Intel SSD 750 Series is rated to pull between 12 and 22 watts when writing to the drive, depending on capacity. That, at least in part, is why you won't see the Intel SSD 750 Series in a standard laptop-thickness 2.5-inch form factor, and why both versions of the drive are covered in fat metal heatsinks. This is a big departure from standard SSDs, both inside and out.
The Intel drive doesn't win on every front. The 512GB and 1TB Samsung SSD 850 Pro drives are rated to withstand up to 300TB of writes, and they come with a 10-year warranty. Both capacities of the Intel SSD 750 Series ship with five years of coverage and are rated for 70GB of writes a day, or a total of 219TB written over the life of the drive.
Granted, the Intel drive has plenty of endurance for a consumer drive. Unless you're running a heavy-duty server, you aren't likely to pummel your drive to the tune of 70GB in writes, seven days a week, every day of every year. But given the Intel drive's price, and the fact that it writes so much faster than any other consumer drive, it would be nice if it had the endurance, or at least the warranty length, of competing Serial ATA drives.
Performance Testing
If you're new to shopping for SSDs, a few things are worth noting when it comes to performance.
For starters: If you're upgrading from a standard spinning hard drive, any modern SSD will be a huge improvement, speeding up boot times and making programs launch more quickly. Most of today's SSDs make use of the SATA 3.0 interface (also called "6Gbps SATA"), to achieve maximum speed versus older SATA 2.0 ports (still common in older PCs), which top out at 300MB per second. We test all our SSDs on a SATA 3.0-equipped testbed PC to show their full performance abilities. To get the most speed possible from a SATA drive, you'll need a system with SATA 3.0 capability, as well. Of course, if you're even looking at a drive like the Intel SSD 750 Series, you're at the point where you've maxed out SATA and you're looking to go beyond.
With the Intel SSD 750 Series, we tested the drive, using the Asus-provided Hyper Kit, in the Asus X99-Deluxe mainboard we mentioned earlier with 16GB of DDR3 memory. The drive was able to access four PCI Express 3.0 lanes via the motherboard's M.2 interface. Our tests below were conducted with the drive set up as secondary storage, but later, we also installed Windows 8.1 Pro onto it and used it for a while as our boot drive on the test system.
PCMark 7 (Secondary Storage Test)
The Secondary Storage Test is a subtest under Futuremark's larger PCMark 7 benchmarking suite. It employs a different approach to drive testing than pure speed tests like AS-SSD, which we'll get to below. PCMark 7 runs a series of scripted tasks typical of everyday PC operation and disk accesses. It measures app launches, video-conversion tasks, image import, operations in Windows Media Center, and more. The result is a proprietary numeric score; the higher the number, the better.
This score is useful in gauging general performance versus other SSDs. Note that we secure-erase all SSDs using the utility Parted Magic before running PCMark 7's Secondary Storage Test.
Intel was very clear that most modern storage and SSD tests haven't been optimized to show the full potential of the SSD 750 Series. That's likely the case here, but the Intel drive still managed to put up the highest score we've seen from an SSD in PCMark 7.
Plextor's M6e PCIe Black Edition, one of the few recent-gen drives we've tested that also accesses PCI Express lanes, landed in second place, as it will on many of our other upcoming tests. (The reason why it's behind: It lacks NVMe support and is limited to PCIe x2 speeds.)
AS-SSD (Sequential Read & Write Speeds)
This test uses the AS-SSD benchmark, which is designed specifically to test solid-state drives (as opposed to traditional hard drives). It measures a drive's ability to read and write large files. Drive makers often quote these speeds, as a theoretical maximum, on their packaging or in advertising.
Sequential speeds are important if you're working with very large files for image or video editing, or you play lots of games with large levels that take a long time to load with traditional hard drives. Like with PCMark 7, we secure-erase all SSDs using the utility Parted Magic before running this test.
Here we start to see just what the Intel SSD 750 Series is capable of. It was almost literally off the chart in our large-file read test, and reasonably close to the rated speed of 2,400MB per second.
The disparity in large-file write speeds wasn't quite as dramatic, but the Intel drive is still in a different league from anything else here. Also, remember that the Intel drive is "only" rated to write large files at 1,200MB per second. On this test, at least, it managed to be more than 100MB per second faster than advertised.
AS-SSD (4K Read & Write Speeds)
This test, also a part of the SSD-centric AS-SSD benchmark, measures a drive's ability to traffic small files. Often overlooked, 4K performance, particularly 4K write performance, is quite important when it comes to boot speed and program launch times.
When booting up and launching programs, many tiny files get accessed and edited frequently. The faster your drive can write and read these kinds of files (especially dynamic link library, or DLL, files in Windows), the faster your OS will "feel." Since small files like these get accessed much more frequently than large media or game-level files, a drive's performance on this test will have a greater impact on how fast a drive feels in everyday use.
This is likely another area where the benchmark just isn't up to showing the true potential of the Intel drive. (We'll look at the IOPS angle on this through another benchmark, Iometer, later on.) Still, the SSD 750 Series did deliver the best performance we've seen on this test, if only by less than a megabyte per second.
In small-file write testing, however, the SSD 750 Series looks very different…
It bested Samsung's SSD 850 Pro here by a factor of more than 2.4x. The Plextor M6e PCI Express drive did better, but it still didn't get close to Intel's NVMe wunderkind.
AS-SSD (Overall Score)
Like PCMark 7, AS-SSD performs a suite of tests on a drive. It provides both individual and performance numbers (some of which we reported above) and an Overall Score that weights a drive's performance across a spate of common scenarios.
On the last of our standard tests, the Intel 750 Series SSD finished very impressively, again landing nearly off the charts. Its score here was nearly four times that of even the Plextor M6e PCIe drive. Clearly, NVMe is going to usher in a new era of fast storage.
IOmeter
Last, we ran a specific test using the IOmeter benchmark, designed to test IOPS. Intel says that, unlike some other benchmarks, this test is more capable of showing what the Intel 750 Series is capable of. At this point, that should be obvious, given what we've already seen in testing. But we ran the Iometer IOPS test, as well, for both reads and writes. We started with sequential reads and writes, which confirmed what we saw in our previous tests...
Intel 750 SSD Sequential Write (Iometer)
Then we moved on to 4K random reads and writes. First, the reads...
The Intel drive didn't quite hit the rated 440,000 IOPS on this test. But for the sake of comparison, we ran the same test on Samsung's SSD 850 Series, and that drive mustered up a score of "only" 98,070.
When it comes to writes, the Intel drive's IOPS managed to best its rated 290,000 IOPS slightly...
The Samsung SSD 850 Pro's score on this test was far, far behind. Given what we've seen in the other benchmarks, while the SSD 850 Pro is a fine SATA drive, it's no match for the bandwidth of PCI Express, the proper implementation of NVMe, and Intel's SSD 750 Series.
Conclusion
In short, Intel has ushered in a new age of super-fast storage with the SSD 750 Series. If you crave storage speed and have a Z97- or X99-based system with an updatable BIOS—and you're not put off by the price—the drive should serve you quite well. If at all possible, we'd stick to the PCI Express add-in card version, however. At least until boards start shipping with native SFF-8643 connectors, the 2.5-inch model will be compatible with relatively few motherboards.
Considering that NVMe boot support was only just rolling out at this writing via BIOS updates, however, it may be a smart move for all but the most eager and intrepid enthusiasts to wait a few months before jumping in to this drive. Other NVMe-based drives, including drives from Samsung, HP, and HGST, seem about to trickle out, as noted by Digital Trends among others. And at least some of these drives will come in the easier-to-work-with M.2 form factor that's starting to become more common on late-model mainboards.
There's no word on pricing for these NVMe drive competitors yet, and we're not entirely sure how they'll perform. But at least some of them are likely to perform similarly to the Intel drive. And given Intel's tendency in recent years to price its consumer SSDs rather high, before long competing drives may end up being more affordable on a cost-per-gigabyte basis.
So, if you need the speed now, are willing to pay for it, and are ready to deal with the kinks of a knotty new standard, the Intel SSD 750 Series should serve you well. Install it right, and it will definitely serve you quickly. But if you have a reasonably speedy SATA-based SSD now, and you can wait until after Computex 2015 (coming up in early June) or the Flash Memory Summit in August, your patience may pay off.
This scorching-fast, cutting-edge SSD implements the new NVMe specification and speeds past any other consumer drive we've tested to date. It's a storage speedster's dream drive, but attaining those awesome speeds will take some work—and, maybe, upgrades.
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