INTEL 750 SSD BENCHMARK UPDATE
Whichever form factor you choose, the drive is supported only by Intel's very latest system-level chipsets, the X99 and Z97, and the board you're installing it on will need to have a BIOS update that supports the NVMe specification. (Known more technically as an SFF-8643 interface on the motherboard end, the internal Mini-SAS port is commonly seen only in enterprise-class storage environments.)īeyond that connector issue, though, even if you opt for the PCI Express card version of the drive, you may have to wait or go to some measures to use it. But we can also say: Unless absolutely necessary, you're better off opting for the PCI Express card version of this drive, or waiting for motherboards to show up with a native Mini-SAS connector onboard, so you don't have to deal with an adapter kit that so far only works with a couple Asus motherboards. And having tested it, we can say one thing with certainty: It's indeed crazy-fast. We received the 2.5-inch version of the drive, along with the Hyper Kit. The 2.5-inch drive has an unusual internal Mini-SAS connector that, at the moment at least, only plugs in to a couple of power-user Asus motherboards via a kludgy converter called the "Hyper Kit." (The Hyper Kit is an adapter that resembles an M.2 SSD and screws down into an M.2 slot on your desktop's motherboard.) Intel offers the drive in two form factors: as a PCI Express add-in card (akin to a small video card), as well as an unorthodox 2.5-inch drive. But they preclude the use of the 2.5-inch drive in laptops-for that and several other reasons.
They are high for a storage drive, at least they're nothing like the power demands of, say, a high-end graphics card. But it's also strictly for desktop-PC users, due to its high power consumption and cooling requirements.
INTEL 750 SSD BENCHMARK SERIES
(We'd also like to see a 750GB or 800GB option for about $750, but that's a modest quibble.)Īs we'll see later in our testing, the SSD 750 Series is without a doubt the fastest single drive you can buy unless you start investigating ones meant for enterprise use or in data centers. However, given that the drive is faster, several times over, than any SATA-based SSD we've tested, the SSD 750 Series' prices are actually pretty reasonable. Now don't read "consumers" as " mainstream consumers": It's definitely not a mainstream drive, as evidenced by its pricing ($380 for the 400GB model, and $1,029 for the 1.2TB model we tested). Intel and Samsung both released NVMe-based drives for enterprise in 20, but the Intel SSD 750 Series is the first NVMe-equipped drive we've seen that's aimed at consumers. It was developed in cooperation with more than 65 companies, including storage-industry and core-system heavyweights such as Intel, Samsung, SanDisk, and Microsoft. NVMe is a new logical-device interface standard designed for SSDs and PCI Express. (The measure of how many commands a drive has in the hopper is known as its "queue depth" for more SSD jargon explained, check out Buying a Solid-State Drive: 20 Terms You Need to Know.) Clearly, a new internal, system-level interface is needed that's built for modern computing and for the strengths of current and future solid-state storage.Įnter Non-Volatile Memory Express, or NVMe for short. But SSDs, partially because they have no moving parts, have low latency, and they can accommodate many more read/write commands at once. It was built to accommodate hard drives, which have high latency, due to their rotating media and physical read/write heads. (For a primer on M.2 drives and the background issues, check out our roundup Buying the Best M.2 Solid-State Drive.)ĪHCI has been around since 2004, but age isn't its biggest problem. PCI Express has much more bandwidth than SATA, but even it has limits, given its current AHCI-reliant implementation for consumer SSDs. That even applies to drives such as the Plextor M6e M.2 (G256M6e) we tested last year, which connects via the emerging M.2 physical interface to the PCI Express bus. Up until now, consumer SSDs have all relied on the venerable Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) to communicate between the drive and the rest of the system.
INTEL 750 SSD BENCHMARK SOFTWARE
Best Hosted Endpoint Protection and Security Software.
0 kommentar(er)
