With the introduction of its SSD DC P3700, P3600, and P3500, Intel is giving us our first taste of the PCIe-based NVMe specification. We take the flagship P3700 for a drive in its 800 GB and 1.6 TB incarnations. Just how fast is the future of storage?
G.Skill Ripjaws Z-Series (4 x 4 GB) DDR3-1600 @ DDR3-1600, 1.5 V
System Drive
Intel SSD 320 160 GB SATA 3Gb/s
Tested Drives
Intel SSD DC P3700 800 GB and 1.6 TB
Graphics
AMD FirePro V4800 1 GB
Power Supply
OCZ ModXStream Pro 700 W
System Software and Drivers
Operating System
Windows 7 x64 Ultimate/Windows Server 2012 R2
DirectX
DirectX 11
Driver
Graphics: AMD 8.883
Benchmark Suite
Iometer v1.1.0
Four Workers, 4 KB Random: LBA=Full, Span Varying Queue Depths
ATTO
v2.4.7, 2 GB, QD=4
Custom
C++, 8 MB Sequential, QD=4
Swipe to scroll horizontally
Enterprise Testing: Iometer Workloads
Read
Write
512 Bytes
1 KB
2 KB
4 KB
8 KB
16 KB
32 KB
64 KB
128 KB
512 KB
Database
67%
100%
n/a
n/a
n/a
n/a
100%
n/a
n/a
n/a
n/a
n/a
File Server
80%
100%
10%
5%
5%
60%
2%
4%
4%
10%
n/a
n/a
Web Server
100%
100%
22%
15%
8%
23%
15%
2%
6%
7%
1%
1%
The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), a working group made up of SSD, flash, and controller vendors, has a testing procedure that attempts to control as many of the variables inherent to SSDs as possible. SNIA’s Solid State Storage Performance Test Specification (SSS PTS) is a great resource for enterprise SSD testing. The procedure does not define what tests should be run, but rather the way in which they are run. This workflow is broken down into four parts:
Purge: Purging puts the drive at a known starting point. For SSDs, this normally means Secure Erase.
Workload-Independent Preconditioning: A prescribed workloadthat is unrelated to the test workload.
Workload-Based Preconditioning: The actual test workload (4 KB random, 128 KB sequential, and so on), which pushes the drive towards a steady state.
Steady State: The point at which the drive’s performance is no longer changing for the variable being tracked.
These steps are critical when testing SSDs. It’s incredibly easy to not fully condition the drive and still observe out-of-box behavior, which may lead one to think that it’s steady-state. These steps are also important when going between random and sequential writes.
OCZ Z-Drive
DC P3700 1.3"
DC P3700 2.5"/800GB
For all performance tests in this review, the SSS PTS was followed to ensure accurate and repeatable results.
All tests employ random data, when available. Intel's SSD DC P3700 does not perform any compression prior to writing, so there is no difference in performance-based data patterns. We also chose to focus our comparisons on the Micron P320h and P420m, which are quite similar in performance and architecture. Both employ a proprietary driver that, while not NVMe, yields a very close approximation.
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OCZ already went there and even made their own connector for providing more bandwith to SSD... just a shame that now Intel try to remove the carpet from beneath the feet of OCZ. Well, old tech is new tech.
By the way, OCZ revodrive was priced similarly, I don't see that big fuzz from Toms here.
