Intel SSD DC P4510 NVMe PCIe Review: Blistering 3GB/s Transfers, With Low Latency

Name: Intel SSD DC P4510
Brand: Intel

by Marco Chiappetta — Wednesday, March 14, 2018, 01:00 PM EDT

Intel SSD DC P4510 - Test Setup, IOMeter, And Compression Tests

Page 2: Intel SSD DC P4510 - Test Setup, IOMeter, And Compression Tests

Our Test Methods: Under each test condition, the SSDs 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 mode was enabled for the host drive.

The SSDs were secure erased prior to testing (when applicable), and left blank without partitions for some tests, while others required them to be partitioned and formatted, as is the case with the ATTO, PCMark, and CrystalDiskMark benchmark tests. Windows firewall, automatic updates, and screen savers were all disabled before testing and Windows 10 Quiet Hours were enabled. In all test runs, we rebooted the system, ensured all temp and prefetch data was purged, waited several minutes for drive activity to settle and for the system to reach an idle state before invoking a test. Also note that all of the drives features here were tested with their own drivers installed -- not the default Windows 10 NVMe driver.

HotHardware Test System

Intel Core i7 and SSD Powered

Processor -

Motherboard -

Video Card -

Memory -

Audio -

Storage -

Intel Core i7-8700K

Gigabyte Z370 Ultra Gaming
(Z370 Chipset, AHCI Enabled)

Intel HD 630

16GB G.SKILL DDR4-2666

Integrated on board

Corsair Force GT (OS Drive)
Intel Optane SSD 900p (280GB)
Micron 9100 MAX (2.4TB)
Intel SSD DC P3700 (800GB)
Intel SSD DC P4600 (2TB)
Intel SSD DC P4510 (2TB, 8TB)

OS -

Chipset Drivers -

DirectX -

Benchmarks -

Windows 10 Pro x64

Intel 10.1.1.44, iRST 15.8.1.1007

DirectX 12

IOMeter 1.1
HD Tune v5.70
ATTO v3.05
AS SSD
CrystalDiskMark v6.0.0 x64
PCMark Storage Bench 2.0
SiSoftware SANDRA

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 results with IOMeter appear to scale, 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, for example. That said, we do think IOMeter is a reliable gauge for relative available throughput with 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; a custom Workstation pattern, with an 8K transfer size, consisting of 80% reads (20% writes) and 80% random (20% sequential) access and a 4K access pattern with a 4K transfer size, comprised of 67% reads (33% writes) and 100% random access. Queue depths from 1 to 32 were tested, though keep in mind, most consumer workloads usually reside at low queue depths...

The Intel SSD DC P4510 2TB and 8TB drives we tested both performed well with the access patterns used here. At the lower queue depths, the drives put up some of the better scores in the group, but things remained tightly coupled for the most part at the higher queue depths.

If we focus on bandwidth and latency at QD1, the Intel SSD DC P4510 looks strong. Available bandwidth and read/write latency is among the best we've seen and is actually in-line with the Optane drive featuring 3D Xpoint memory technology.

AS SSD Compression Benchmark

Bring Your Translator: http://bit.ly/aRx11n

Next up we ran the Compression Benchmark built-into AS SSD, an SSD specific benchmark being developed by Alex Intelligent Software. This test is interesting because it uses a mix of compressible and non-compressible data and outputs both Read and Write throughput of the drive. We only graphed a small fraction of the data (1% compressible, 50% compressible, and 100% compressible), but the trend is representative of the benchmark’s complete results.

The compressibility of data being transferred on these drives has virtually no impact on performance either -- the slight variances here are due to the margin of error in this benchmark. The Intel SSD DC P4510 8TB drive put up exceptional numbers thanks to its impressive write speeds, but reads were strong as well. The 2TB drive landed somewhere in the middle of pack in both the read and write tests.