Intel SSD 750 Series PCIe SSD Review: NVMe For Desktop Performance

ATTO Disk Benchmark

ATTO is another "quick and dirty" type of disk benchmark that measures transfer speeds across a specific volume length. It measures raw transfer rates for both reads and writes and graphs them out in an easily interpreted chart. We chose .5kb through 8192kb transfer sizes and a queue depth of 10 over a total max volume length of 256MB. ATTO's workloads are sequential in nature and measure raw bandwidth, rather than I/O response time, access latency, etc.
ATTO Disk Benchmark
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ATTO Read


ATTO Write

This is where things start to get interesting. Though the SSD 750 is built with the same Intel NVMe controller and the same Intel MLC NAND Flash as the DX P3700, you can see where the two drives are tuned for different, but specific user workloads - the SSD 750 set to handle small and large, sequential reads, while the P3700 is tuned to handle both reads and writes well, but less aggressively on smaller read requests. On reads, both Intel cards skunk the competition, whereas on writes, the SSD 750 is more middle of the pack. Note, however, how quickly the SSD 750 gets up to speed no matter what you throw at it. It chews through small file transfers better than just about any card we've tested to date, with the exception of maybe a Fuion-io ioDrive 160, which also, tops out at under 1GB/sec for the older model we tested.

The reason there are similarities here in small file requests is that latency advantage we were speaking of earlier that the native NVMe interface has over the other products that have to translate back to SATA on the boards with multiple controllers. Only the Fusion-io card has a custom FPGA for its Flash memory to PCIe interface, similar to Intel's NVMe solutions (SSD 750 and P3700), so both of these cards show much lower latency response times in small file transfers.

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