The Tech Report have updated their storage testbed to properly benchmark PCIe SSDs, the M.2 versions as well as ones such as Intel's DC P3700 which takes up a full slot. They contrast the performance with 10 popular SATA drives to give you an idea of the difference performance a PCI SSD will give you. The rather expensive DC P3700 dominates almost every test they performed, apart from boot times in Windows 8.1 which are still well under 1 minute. Read through the review with your own usage patterns in mind, in many cases a SATA SSD is still a great choice for many gamers and are much more affordable. Then again, if you can afford a $2500 SSD, Intel's offering is definitely king.
"SSDs have been bumping up against the limits of the Serial ATA interface for a while, but they don't have to be stuck behind the 6Gbps link. Native PCIe drives with way more bandwidth have made their way onto the market over the past year. We've tackled a trio of them—Plextor's M6e, Samsung's XP941, and Intel's server-grade DC P3700—with a fresh slate of benchmarks to see how the new breed stacks up against the SATA incumbents."
Here are some more Storage reviews from around the web:
- Intel's 750 Series @ The Tech Report
- The Intel SSD 750 Series Performance Review @ Hardware Canucks
- Intel 750 PCIe @ The SSD Review
- Intel SSD 750 Series 1.2TB PCIe NVMe @ Kitguru
- Samsung 850 EVO mSATA @ The SSD Review
- Samsung SSD 850 EVO mSATA @ Benchmark Reviews
- Silicon Power S80 240GB SATA @ The SSD Review
- Seagate Seven Steel External USB 3.0 Drive Review @ NikKTech
Surprising to see that the
Surprising to see that the Intel PCIe drive boots up considerably slower than a regular Sata drive, how much longer do we have to wait for ‘instant on’?
Depends on what is
Depends on what is included…
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canucks-reviews/69131-intel-ssd-750-series-review-13.html
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canucks-reviews/69131-intel-ssd-750-series-review-14.html
As soon as start-up has number of things going on, picture will change…
That is strange. Maybe I am
That is strange. Maybe I am missing something here, but I was understanding that Windows 8(.1) boot times are supposed to be a lot faster than Windows 7 boot times.
Hardware conucks uses a Windows 7 install on their pool of SSDs and it shows the new Intel P3700 is at the head of the pack.
The Tech Report uses a BARE Windows 8 install on a their SSDs and it shows the same P3700 is almost the slowest out of all of them.
Maybe you guys at PCPer could go over this in a podcast or another article and explain why both Review sites did tests using essentially a BARE OS install on pretty much same set of SSDs, and yet what should be a much slower OS(Win7) booting up faster than Win8 on the new highend P3700.
They did a ‘bare’ and a
They did a 'bare' and a 'loaded'. Al would have a far more informed opinion as he has played with one but it the theory is it could be how NVMe boot works and if it is properly supported on the machine you test on.
Yea, I know both sites did 2
Yea, I know both sites did 2 different boot tests, one using a bare fresh install of Windows and the other having a few different apps installed along with the OS. I was mainly talking about the BARE OS install test each review site did, since those would be the most comparable as opposed to the other tests using various apps.
I really thought that the difference in the boot times of Win 8 vs Win 7 would have been much smaller, not totally reversed at a large gap! But if the actual issue is indeed with how NVMe works on the respective review site’s test beds, then that explains it. Not that I can afford such a monster of a drive at the moment, it’s just interesting to see the results and the somewhat weird differences, thanks for the reply!