Intelntel 750 Series 400GB
An awesome alternative to M.2
SIZE MATTERS. At least, it does with some PC components. Check out the beasts of the graphics card market for proof. But SSDs? Not so much. In fact, it’s a measure of the insane innovation in solid-state storage that the two hottest competitors of our benchmarkathon are also the biggest and littlest of this test, physically speaking.
So, the fact that this Intel 750 Series SSD is far larger than Samsung’s diminutive 950 Pro reflects a difference in interface, not necessarily capacity or performance. Where the Samsung is an M.2 drive, this Intel is pure PCI Express. Of course, you could say it boils down to much the same quad-lane PCI Express capabilities in both.
That’s not the only similarity. Just like the Samsung drive, this Intel SSD is one of the very few that can be said to be the vision of just one company. Intel makes the memory, the controller, and the firmware.
As for specs, there’s a certain amount of tit for tat. Peak read performance is similar for both drives, at 2.5GB/s for Samsung and 2.2GB/s for this 400GB version of the Intel 750. But Samsung claims a 50 percent performance advantage for writes, with Intel rating the 750 Series 400GB model at 900MB/s. On the other hand, Intel makes bolder claims for 4K random access performance, with 430K read IOPS and 230K writes. Game on.
In synthetic tests, such as CrystalMark and ATTO, the drives line up much as the claims would have you expect. The Samsung 950 has a marked edge in sequential writes, while Intel parries that with a lead in 4K random writes. If there is a surprise, it’s the Intel 750’s disappointing 4K random read performance. At 40MB/s, it’s not as good as the best of the SATA drives. That’s disappointing, given that the new NVMe protocol is supposed to revolutionize performance for this kind of workload.
It’s also disappointing because random access performance is responsible for making a PC subjectively feel speedy with day-to-day tasks. Arguably, then, for most people, most of the time, the benefits of these brave new PCI Express drives may not be all that dramatic.