Intel 760p SSD
Intel produces something that’s value for money. Jarred Walton is shocked.
Solid state drives become ever faster, cheaper and more capacious. Intel is refreshing its entire range and this one is our favourite balancing price and speed.
Intel has bidden farewell to the old SATA interface and is pursuing higher performance with NVMe drives. The company is already top dog with the extremely fast – and equally expensive – Optane SSD 900p (see LXF233) series, which launched back in October. For mainstream customers, Intel uses its own 3D NAND with licensed controllers, such as the SSD 600p’s SM2260 from Silicon Motion.
Intel is updating its mainstream SSD offerings with several new lines: the 760p, Pro 7600p and E 6100p. We’re interested in the 760p, because the 7600p is a business solution that adds a few security and manageability features, while the 6100p is intended for IoT and embedded solutions.
The 760p has two major differences from the previous generation 600p series. First, it uses new 64-layer TLC 3D NAND; second, it uses the new Silicon Motion SM2262 controller. The older 600p remains one of the slowest NVMe drives on the market. That’s thanks in part to the first-generation SM controller, which keeps costs down by not including any DRAM. The new 760p model includes DRAM. Future models may omit DRAM, but use NVMe’s Host Memory Buffer feature, which can use some system RAM for cache. This will reduce costs, but hit performance.
Available now are the 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB models, with 1TB and 2TB arriving in early 2018. Intel rates the 760p NAND endurance at 72TB per 128GB capacity.
Pure SSD performance starts to become far less important beyond a certain point. For many people, even a good SATA drive remains plenty fast enough. For tasks like loading files and booting, there’s not much difference between a modest SATA drive and the fastest NVMe drives. But if you do any storage-intensive work (heavy database or VM access), the difference becomes more meaningful.
Intel’s new 760p 512GB sits pretty much smack in the middle of the performance tests. The new Samsung 860 Evo basically gets pummelled by the NVMe drives, but for price it’s clear why NVMe is now the recommendation. Generally the 760p can’t keep up with better (and more costly) drives, but it still more than doubles the performance of most SATA drives.
A balanced product
At current SSD prices, the 760p 512GB represents the best value for storage balanced with performance. The Samsung 960 Evo 500GB is the chief competition – providing slightly better performance under testing, but costing slightly more – and it’ll be interesting to see how pricing fluctuates over the year.
If you’re in the market for a new PC in the coming months, and you’re willing to pay a bit of a price premium for NVMe storage, Intel’s SSD 760p series makes a strong case for being the drive you should use. Unless you’re after maximum performance with less regard for pricing, in which case the Samsung 960 Pro still tops the charts for M.2 storage, while Intel’s Optane SSD 900p easily takes the pole position for overall performance.
Regardless of which drive you choose, competition in the market is good, and after 18 months of slowly increasing SSD prices, hopefully we’ve reached the summit and are starting back down the hill.