PCMark 8's Storage Consistency test is fast becoming my favorite canned benchmark. Usually, that's code for lazy benchmarking. But the folks at Futuremark really came up with something stellar using PCMark 8's real-world workloads. What we end up with are trace-based tests played back to back, with specific conditioning that happens prior to each round. I've gone into a lot of depth on this in past reviews, so if you'd like to know more, I invite you to go back and read the background page.
PCMark 8 Storage Consistency Test: Bandwidth
PCMark 8's Adobe Photoshop (Heavy) trace is far and away the most intensive of the trace bundle. That's why we use it to show latency and bandwidth data for each of the 18 constituent rounds.

I'll let you guess which line on the graph represents Samsung's XP941.
Have you figured it out yet? Here's a hint: it's the fastest one. And not by a small amount, either. The XP941 serves up a benchmark-setting 700 MB/s in the recovery rounds. It dips as low as 500 MB/s in the debilitating degrade phase, which is simply unheard of. Even attached to the Z97 PCH's two-lane M.2 slot, it's still intensely quick. There's just a less capable interface supporting it.
Samsung's XP941 is as much as 20x faster than some of the quickest 6 Gb/s SSDs in this particular trace from this particular benchmark (that is to say our results don't necessarily map over to other workloads). It's hard to overlook the crushing defeat Plextor's M6e (in purple) and Samsung's own 840 EVO (in orange) sustain at the hands of this M.2 drive.
Despite my skepticism of AHCI-based PCIe storage, Samsung at least shows its XP941 to be an exception to the rule.

And here are the overall scores, showing the best and worst scores across PCMark 8's 18 rounds. No surprise, Samsung's XP941 owns the top tier. ASRock's Ultra M.2 slot hosting Samsung M.2 drive pushes as high as 5016 PCMarks. Attached to the PCH's M.2 interface, it registers a score of 4999.
- High-Performance Storage On ASRock's Z97 Extreme6
- M.2 And SATA Express, Discussed
- Z97 Express: The Same Old Bandwidth Limitations
- Testing Samsung's XP941 On Z97 Express
- Results: A PCIe SSD's Sequential Performance
- Results: A PCIe SSD's Random Performance
- Results: Tom's Hardware Storage Bench v.1.0
- Results: PCMark 8 Storage Consistency Test
- ASRock's Z97 Extreme6: Only Satisfied By Samsung's XP941
That said, I feel like X99, NVMe, and and M.2 products will coincide nicely with their respective releases dates. Another interesting piece to the puzzle will be DDR4. Will the new storage technology and next-generation CPUs utilize it's speed, or like DD3, will it take several generations for other technologies to catch up to RAM speeds? This is quite an interesting time
Way to turn things around ASRock! Cheap as chips and rock steady!
PCI-e 3.0 x8 has enough bandwidth for any single card. The only downside to using PCI-e lanes on the SSD applies only to people who want to use multiple GPUs.
Still, though, this is just the mid-range platform anyway. People looking for lots of expansion end up buying the X chipsets rather than the Z chipsets because of the greater expandability. I feel like the complaint is really misplaced for Z chipsets, since they only have 16 PCI-e lanes to begin with.
Well, it'll definitely negate some GPU configurations, same as any PCIe add-in over the CPU's lanes. With so few lanes to work with on Intel's mainstream platforms, butting heads is inevitable.
Regards,
Christopher Ryan
Awww, shucks!
Regards,
Christopher Ryan
SATA3 has a theoretical max of 6Gbps (750MBps). However, the practical max is more around 600MBps.
Assuming you are running your Intel 730's in RAID-0 and achieving the max practical throughput, you'd still only come up with ~1200MBps which is slower than what Tom's saw at 1400MBps ON A SINGLE DRIVE.
SATA3 has a theoretical max of 6Gbps (750MBps). However, the practical max is more around 600MBps.
Assuming you are running your Intel 730's in RAID-0 and achieving the max practical throughput, you'd still only come up with ~1200MBps which is slower than what Tom's saw at 1400MBps ON A SINGLE DRIVE.
SATA3 has a theoretical max of 6Gbps (750MBps). However, the practical max is more around 600MBps.
Assuming you are running your Intel 730's in RAID-0 and achieving the max practical throughput, you'd still only come up with ~1200MBps which is slower than what Tom's saw at 1400MBps ON A SINGLE DRIVE.
SATA3 has a theoretical max of 6Gbps (750MBps). However, the practical max is more around 600MBps.
Assuming you are running your Intel 730's in RAID-0 and achieving the max practical throughput, you'd still only come up with ~1200MBps which is slower than what Tom's saw at 1400MBps ON A SINGLE DRIVE.
SATA3 has a theoretical max of 6Gbps (750MBps). However, the practical max is more around 600MBps.
Assuming you are running your Intel 730's in RAID-0 and achieving the max practical throughput, you'd still only come up with ~1200MBps which is slower than what Tom's saw at 1400MBps ON A SINGLE DRIVE.
Actually, the 4 KB writes are really an artifact of the AHCI controller/API. If you took the same flash and controller on the Sammy, but rigged it to use NVMe, I think you'd see a big bump in random 4 KB performance. I've said over and over that desktop users, for now, are better off by using a couple SATA drives in RAID. More than just adding bandwidth, which isn't always important (strictly speaking), it lowers service times significantly. Plus, it's great to just keep adding cheap drives and getting more performance and capacity (when striped). See the Plextor M6e PCIe review for my thoughts on this.
It's all academic anyway, since you can only buy the XP941 from a few random places, and it's $750. If I had a laptop which could use it, maybe I go that route, but even there SATA is just more power efficient. Give me a 1 TB EVO or M550 instead..... at least for the time being.
PS: Is this Jon C??
Regards,
Christopher Ryan
Totally agree! For now.
I also added the 750 EVO in there because (I believe) the only difference between the 1TB and the 750GB is capacity, unlike the smaller drives, which actually have less performance (i.e. 120, 250, & 500 GB).