Intel 750 Series NVME SSD Review

Introduction and Up Close

Introduction

The desire for, and appreciation of, speed is always relative to where you've originated. Those of us who are old enough to remember when you started loading a game on tape, went off to have your dinner and then played five minutes of it before your Dad wanted the TV, always appreciated the speed of a floppy disk. In turn floppy disk users appreciate hard drives. Which brings us roughly up to date as even the newest enthusiast will have started on HDDs.

HDDs seemed relatively quick at the time. There was a lot of toing and froing when Solid State Drives first appeared about their relative benefits. Anyone who hadn't actually used one couldn't understand how much better they were in every regard. They're faster to access and faster in use. Those of us who have endured a vibrating case know that they're a lot quieter in use too. The idea of an SSD not being your weapon of choice is as antiquated as suggesting that HD Diskettes are fine because who'd need more than 1.44MB of storage.

The problem with SSDs though is one of backwards compatibility. When we moved from IDE to SATA, so gradually IDE was phased out until only SATA remained, with its 300MBs bandwidth. If you want people to buy your storage device, so you need to build it on a platform they can use, i.e SATA. Swiftly SATA was upgraded to SATA III, 6Gb/s and that felt like enough. That was until the SandForce controller appeared and saturated that bandwidth too. Like all technologies that speed dripped down until even the most affordable SSDs are now over 500MBs. Which is where we get stuck. SATA can't go any quicker. There is SATA Express, but that's a bit of a Heath Robinson solution.

What we need is something that dispenses with SATA as a concept, and frees up SSDs to go as fast as they possibly can. On which segue we introduce today's review, the Intel 750 NVM Express.

Up Close

The Intel NVM driver uses just the PCI Express 3.0 support built into their latest architecture, which allows for a PCI Express drive that breaks through the boundaries of what is currently possible. It does mean that the drive itself isn't much to look at. It's clean and crisp as all Intel products are, with echoes of their current 530 series SSDs in the design.

Normally when writing a review we drip feed you our thoughts as we go, revealing them slowly until by the conclusion you finally have a grasp of the entirety of our opinion. With the 750 Series NVME there will be no such teasing. The fact that, as you can see in the bottom right image, the sticker is upside down when it's installed is the biggest gripe we have should indicate the high praise that is in store for this behemoth amongst storage solutions.

1 - Introduction and Up Close 2 - Technology 3 - Anvil MB/s 4 - Anvil IOPS 5 - Anvil Sequential 6 - ATTO 7 - Crystal Disk Mark 8 - AIDA64 and PC Mark 8 9 - Conclusion «Prev 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Next»

Most Recent Comments