Intel SSD DC P3608 PCIe NVMe Solid State Drive Review
Test Setup And IOMeter v1.1
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. 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.
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Motherboard - Video Card - Memory - Audio - Storage -
| Hardware Used: 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) Intel SSD 750 Intel SSD DC P3700 Intel SSD DX P3608 Kingstin HyperX Predator | OS - Chipset Drivers - DirectX - Video Drivers - | Relevant Software: Windows 10 Pro x64 Intel 10.1.19, iRST 14.5.0.1081 DirectX 11 Intel HD 15.40.3.4248 Benchmarks Used: 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 |
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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.
The Intel SSD DC P3608 crushed the other drives we tested here, in both access patterns. Since the P3608 would be most similar to pair of P3700 series drives in RAID, it's no surprise to see it doubling the P3700 series drive's performance.
The overall bandwidth numbers jibe with the IOPs data above--The Intel SSD DC P3608 offers up tons of bandwidth, thanks to its dual NVMe controllers and PCI Express x8 interface.
