Intel 750 Series 400GB Versus Samsung SM951 512GB

[Guest]

We're pitting Intel's 400GB SSD 750 against Samsung's 512GB SM951 because they're the fastest PCIe-based drives in their respective categories today.

Intel 750 Series 400GB Versus Samsung SM951 512GB : Read more

 

[BoredErica]

Hey, I would love to see a new article about trace-based analysis of hard drive load. I've got some money to splurge on storage I don't strictly NEED, but actually I have no idea what to buy. Just a thought.

 

[Arabian Knight]

agaiiiin

How about testing the Intel 750 card in Raid 0 ?

please add another Card and try software raid .

 

[PaulBags]

RE: Sequential Steady State, what is the percent scale in that graph? I assume one end is writes and one read, but which? Graph needs to be properly labeled.

 

[PaulBags]

Sequential steady state vs random steady state, switching between IOPs and MB/s, yay that's comparible. Bah, I'm done with this article. Bppppppt.

 

[jedimindtriks]

flexxmemory.co.uk has the sm951 for 350$

 

[Blueberries]

I'd take a 750 over the SM951 any day, you just can't beat the latency and random read/write performance. The SM951 is probably hands down the best SSD right now for the typical PC user, all things considered; having neck-and-neck or better performance at low queue depths and of course a much faster boot time.

Get the 750 if you're an enthusiast and you can afford it. Otherwise the SM951 is going to be the best performance you've experienced in your life.

 

[Osiricat]

Hi! Anything about temps? I read in earliers reviews that SM951 warms up to 70-75ºC, for some reason intel added passive cooling over theirs memory chips!

 

[CRamseyer]

The industry standard is to measure random performance in IOPS and sequential performance in throughput. Why would you want to compare sequential IOPS to random IOPS or sequential throughput to random throughput?

The sequential steady state shows read percentage. 100% read to 0% read. It's mainly an enterprise test I imported a few years ago in my testing to see the bathtub curve of the devices under test.

As for RAID with these drives. I'm not sure if a RAID Report is really needed. You can't boot from devices in Windows software RAID. If 5% of the market cares about these premium parts to start with then RAID performance has to amount to 5 to 10% of those readers. I don't think there are enough readers to justify the time and expense for that level of testing. If Intel wants to provide the parts I don't mind testing and writing the article.

Chris

 

[PaulBags]

The industry standard is to measure random performance in IOPS and sequential performance in throughput. Why would you want to compare sequential IOPS to random IOPS or sequential throughput to random throughput?

...

Chris

So that I can see the difference? How much of a performance drop is there with random vs sequential? Yes I don't get to decide how my data travels, but is random throughput significantly above the sata 6gb ceiling or does interface not _really_ matter yet unless you have a lot of sequential reads/writes to do? Additionally, what kind of performance is there when there is mixed sequential and random; somewhere in between the two or would comparing the two be completely irrelevant?

 

[CRamseyer]

Random performance is never higher than the limits of SATA 6Gbps unless you have a product like the Memblaze or P320H that can deliver full PCIe bandwidth random 4K reads and writes. Those are both enterprise products that cost more than a used Honda.

Measuring 4K data in throughput is like telling someone the length of a dollar bill in miles.

 

[CRamseyer]

Intel SSD 750 400GB QD1 Ran Read = 47.99
Intel SSD 750 400GB QD1 Ran Write = 301.7

Samsung SM951 512GB AHCI QD1 Ran Read = 48.87
Samsung SM951 512GB AHCI QD1 Ran Write = 156.5

As measured in CDM.

 

[jedimindtriks]

I'd take a 750 over the SM951 any day, you just can't beat the latency and random read/write performance. The SM951 is probably hands down the best SSD right now for the typical PC user, all things considered; having neck-and-neck or better performance at low queue depths and of course a much faster boot time.

Get the 750 if you're an enthusiast and you can afford it. Otherwise the SM951 is going to be the best performance you've experienced in your life.

i had the 750 400gb and i had to return it, everything from boot times to performance was worse than a normal ssd. and sure enough when i looked at real world benchmarks it either is slower or sometimes a second faster. where as boot times where just stupid slow compared to even the cheapst ssds,

so i returned it and got a samsung 850 pro instead, much better daily disk

 

[CRamseyer]

I've been booting off of the 400GB for a couple of weeks now in a development system. Everything runs really well. Can you tell us a little more about your motherboard, video cards and anything connected to the PCIe bus? I suspect you have some other issue, possibly the PCIe slot the card was installed in.

 

[Eggz]

Good start, but this showdown isn't real until Tom's gets its hands on the NVMe variant of the Samsung SM951. But then again PC Perspective already did that.

http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Storage/PCIe-SSD-Roundup-Samsung-SM951-NVMe-vs-AHCI-XP941-SSD-750-and-More/Random-Performanc

 

[CRamseyer]

The drives Intel shipped with the NUCs were not the final firmware. We have our sample from Samsung with the MP firmware and it's ready to post now. It should be online in a few days.

In that article I put it against the SM951 (AHCI) and the 850 Pro.

 

[unityole]

"Enthusiasts should keep their fingers crossed for some type of Rapid Storage Technology driver with support for NVMe and Skylake in Windows 10."

thats what i live for

 

[Eggz]

The drives Intel shipped with the NUCs were not the final firmware. We have our sample from Samsung with the MP firmware and it's ready to post now. It should be online in a few days.

In that article I put it against the SM951 (AHCI) and the 850 Pro.

I messaged RAM City about the NVMe version of the SM951, and they said to expect it sometime between late June and the month of July. Stoked!!!

 

[JOSHSKORN]

Would be interested to see another comparison when the SM951-NVMe is released.

 

[jedimindtriks]

Would be interested to see another comparison when the SM951-NVMe is released.

http://www.legitreviews.com/samsung-sm951-nvme-m-2-pcie-ssd-review_162219/5

basicly all the disks perform the exact same when it comes to daily usage, sm951 nvme and intel 750 nvme are 5 seconds faster than the 850 pro when it comes to windows defender. other than that its all the fking same.

this might be due to drivers or that the z97/x99 systems arent fully optimized for it.

 

[Johnpombrio]

Both of these enterprise SSDs are useless for the average computer user or gamer. Do you have multiple SATA SSDs in a raid configuration? Do you NEED that raid configuration? If yes, then get one of these drives. Otherwise, stick with a SATA SSD as it will be more compatible with hardware and will have as good as performance (if not better) than these Enterprise SSDs.

 

[CRamseyer]

In the same vein I could do 99% of my daily computer activities on a Pentium III but what is the fun in that.

 

[Blueberries]

Both of these enterprise SSDs are useless for the average computer user or gamer. Do you have multiple SATA SSDs in a raid configuration? Do you NEED that raid configuration? If yes, then get one of these drives. Otherwise, stick with a SATA SSD as it will be more compatible with hardware and will have as good as performance (if not better) than these Enterprise SSDs.

I disagree wholeheartedly, at least on the SM951 front, especially if you take into account battery life. Sure it's not as big of a leap as an HDD to an 850 Pro, but we're still talking about much faster drives, and the only drives that shine at low queue-depths.

 

[Eggz]

Yeah, good performance with low latency at low queue depths is really what matters for people anyway. Even doing a RAID 0 won't help with that. The drives are the same and will just team up on transfers. This new NVMe protocol is going to be sweet when it matures.

 

[bit_user]

In the same vein I could do 99% of my daily computer activities on a Pentium III but what is the fun in that.

Having used a 3.2 GHz Pentium 4 for certain tasks until about 1 year ago, I disagree with that. You probably don't realize how much Javascript websites now use, and how sophisticated it has gotten.

BTW, nice article. I really appreciate all of the analysis. But, no under-provisioning benchmarks?