Intel SSD DC P3520 Series NVMe PCIe Enterprise Solid State Drive Review


Test Setup And IOMeter 1.1 RC

Our Test Methodologies: Under each test condition, the Solid State Drives tested here were installed as secondary volumes in our testbed, with a separate drive used for the OS and benchmark installations. Out testbed's motherboard was updated with the latest BIOS available at the time of publication and AHCI (or RAID) mode was enabled as necessary. The SSDs were secure erased prior to testing, and left blank without partitions for some tests, while others required them to be partitioned and formatted, as is the case with our ATTO, PCMark 7, and CrystalDiskMark benchmark tests. Windows firewall, automatic updates and screen savers were all disabled before testing. In all test runs, we rebooted the system, ensured all temp and prefetch data was purged, and waited several minutes for drive activity to settle and for the system to reach an idle state before invoking a test.

intel dc p3520 5
HotHardware Test System
Intel Core i7 and SSD Powered
Processor -

Motherboard -


Video Card -

Memory -

Audio -

Storage -

Intel Core i7-6700K

Asus Z170 Deluxe
(Z170 Chipset, AHCI Enabled)

Intel HD 430

16GB Corsair DDR4-2666

Integrated on board

Corsair Force GT (OS Drive)
Micron 9100 MAX
Intel SSD 750
Intel SSD DC P3700
Intel SSD DC P3520
Kingstin HyperX Predator
OS -
Chipset Drivers -
DirectX -

Video Drivers -

Benchmarks Used -
Windows 10 Pro x64
Intel 10.1.19, iRST 14.5.0.1081
DirectX 11

Intel HD 15.40.3.4248

IOMeter 1.1.0 RC
HD Tune v5.60
ATTO v3.05
AS SSD
CrystalDiskMark v5.0.2 x64
PCMark 7
SiSoftware Sandra 2015 SP3

IOMeter
I/O Subsystem Measurement Tool

As we've noted in previous SSD articles, though IOMeter is clearly a well-respected industry standard drive benchmark, we're not completely comfortable with it for testing SSDs. The fact of the matter is, though our actual results with IOMeter appear to scale properly, it is debatable whether or not certain access patterns, as they are presented to and measured on an SSD, actually provide a valid example of real-world performance--the access patterns we tested may not reflect your particular workload. That said, we do think IOMeter is a reliable gauge for relative available throughput within a given storage solution. In addition, there are certain higher-end workloads you can place on a drive with IOMeter, that you can't with most other storage benchmark tools available currently.

In the following tables, we're showing two sets of access patterns; our custom Workstation pattern, with an 8K transfer size, 80% reads (20% writes) and 80% random (20% sequential) access and a 4K access pattern with a 4K transfer size, comprised of 67% reads (34% writes) and 100% random access.

io1


io2

The Intel SSD DC P3520 2TB drive we tested offered relatively strong performance here, which fell about in the middle of the pack in the 4K random workload. It fared much better with the 8K/80/80 access pattern, however.

 io3

The overall bandwidth numbers are in-line with our IOPS scores above. The Intel SSD DC P3520 2TB drive trailed its big brother and some of the much more expensive drives with the 100% random 4K access pattern, but performance was still very good.


Tags:  Intel, SSD, Storage, nvme, dc p3520

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