Intel Unleashes NVMe SSD 750 Series For Consumer PCs

[glorfendel]

These will probably not reach their full potential until SkyLake comes out. PCIe 3.0 x4 lanes is good but these 750 SSD's with NVMe are only hitting between 900M/ps write and up to 2,400 M/ps read.

When Skylake comes out they should be hitting 4000 M/ps so ...

What the CPU family does not matter at all its pcie 3.0 it has a pcie 3.0 controller putting it in a pcie 3.1 does not change anything. If you have the lanes it will run at the top speed minus overhead. The top speed of pcie storage is the nand its self. Look at the specs more space = more chips = faster they put raid controllers on pcie cards to get the speed up.

 

[tom10167]

Now I'm kicking myself for buying a 512 GB 850 Pro two months ago

ha, and I just used this news to buy a used 840 pro 512

 

[TechyInAZ]

Wow that's cool! I've purposely been putting off upgrading my old 2 year old SSD and waiting for SSD's like this. Now I just have to wait for price to drop.

 

[Brian_R170]

Hopefully, we'll see this as an M.2 card with IMFT 3D-NAND soon.

 

[Brian_R170]

Scratch that. Anantech's review shows the Samsung SM951 in M.2 with PCIe AHCI (instead of NVMe) is performance competitive and uses only a tiny fraction of the 750-series' power.

There's also a rumor that an NVMe version of the SM951 does exist.

 

[PaulAlcorn]

I wonder what 4 X SSD in RAID0 could do against that thing. I'm already doing 950MB/s sequential read with my 2 old Crucial M4 128GB...

This should slay the 4x SSD array pretty handily, especially at low QD and in steady state. The problem with RAID is that it is constrained by the PCH, which communicates via DMI interface. There is only a PCIe Gen2 x4 connection (ouch) back to the proc, which limits speeds to 1.8 GBps maximum. Keep in mind, this is the entire bandwidth available for everything on the DMI, so other devices will also feed from this same pool. Question for Intel: Why are we using PCIe 2.0 x4 DMI in 2015?

Also, is there a way to RAID0 2 of those SSD PCIe cards? The speed would be crazy, unless it would choke the PCIe bus at some point, let's say with 2 X GTX 980 in SLI on top of everything else?

You can raid them into a dynamic volume, but the system will not be able to boot from the volume. I would *theorize* there will not be an appreciable performance loss when used in SLI, there are plenty of lanes (40) on high-end chipsets.

Hopefully, we'll see this as an M.2 card with IMFT 3D-NAND soon.

This is inevitable, of course, but not at this speed...at least not based upon this particular architecture. In the briefing with Intel they indicated that attempting to roll a new m.2 would result in unacceptable tradeoffs, there are incredibly tight tolerances for power/heat with m.2. Even SATA based devices are running into heat issues with m.2 designs, thermal throttling, etc.
Of course, just the size of the 18-channel chip precludes its use in an m.2....

 

[Chaoss]

Sadly these drives probably have very poor write/erase cycles and if you are like me and do A LOT of data writing you'll find your new drives useless in a matter of months. Intel SSDs also kill themselves once the rated number of write cycles is reached, where most SSD's will continue on long after their rated period. They also become unreadable rendering them useless for anything but gaming.

I winded up getting the HyperX 480GB M.2 drive due to the low temps and insane write cycle rating (almost a PB, probably more since I've over-provisioned). I would love a 1.2TB SSD with super low latencies and NVMe support and I would be lying if I didn't feel a bit bummed ONE day after ordering my M.2 drive these come out.

I'll stick to running my OS and main apps on the M.2 drive and using my 2 ioDrive2's for work and personal files/games respectively

 

[PaulAlcorn]

Intel mentioned that they have made changes to the client version of the firmware that will allow it to continue use after certain errors that would automatically brick it for enterprise models. I will reach out for clarification on the EOL write cycles.

 

[George Mulligan]

You mention they are available now, but the egg shows a first offering date of 4/24. Did I miss something, or were you referring to enterprise customers?