

The QD64 AS SSD Random Write results are the one area where Intel still holds a significant advantage, but that’s a pretty unlikely use case for consumers.Īs we continue through the benchmarks, IOmeter confirms the AS SSD results, but an interesting thing happens when we get to the “real world”: Samsung wins out in both the file copy test and PCMark 8 Storage. the 512GB Samsung, things would likely be much closer-and you’d get 112GB of additional storage from Samsung. The Intel 1.2TB drive is faster, but if we had the 400GB Intel vs. Basically, very few people are going to have a board with SFF-8643, so there’s not much demand for those drives.Ĭonsidering the relatively low capacity, the SM951 does well in our sequential and random transfer results. Intel offers the drive in a 2.5-inch form factor as well, though it requires relatively rare SFF-8643 (Serial Attached SCSI) connector. There are other potential concerns, though, like the need for an x4 PCIe 3.0 slot to realize maximum performance, and a motherboard that has BIOS support for NVMe. The biggest issue is price: The smallest version is 400GB and costs just under $400, while the larger 800GB and 1.2TB models double and triple the capacity and price. Intel’s SSD 750 is awesome, but there are a few limitations.


If you’re just interested in what this means to the end user, NVMe has much higher bandwidth and some optimizations to reduce latency and improve throughput. The core differences between NVMe and AHCI are that NVMe has significantly more queues and supports more commands per queue (65536 queues and commands per queue, compared to one queue with up to 32 commands), it has more interrupt options, and there’s significantly improved parallelism for the interface and devices. NVMe connects to storage via a PCI Express interface, opting to use the existing standard rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) is a new standard designed specifically around the needs of SSDs, where previous SSDs used the AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) command set that was built for SATA drives-which initially consisted solely of hard drives and other slow storage options.
