Intel SSD 750 (1.2TB)

[HEXUS]

NVMe comes to the consumer platform.

Read more.

[Roobubba]

Fantastic to finally see NVMe units in review! Now hopefully other manufacturers won't be too far behind and we can get some nice competition going to bring those prices down a bit!

[deejayburnout]

I watched a review of this today and was blown away at the speed. Simply epic.

[zaph0d]

Hmmm. I still prefer a standard SSD to run OS and run Games and other HDD limited programs from Ramdrives where the image is stored on good old high capacity mech drives.

As an example - it takes me 60-90s to load an 18 gig modded Skyrim image from a pair of Raid0 750GB drives, from that point load times in-game are instant to two seconds. I once benchmarked a 12GB ramdrive and got 4k read/write speeds of about 7GB/s. No SSD can compete with Ram on performance. On Price not so much, I've got 24GB in triple-channel atm with 6 dimms so anything that needs more than 18GB image is right out. Waiting for DDR3 prices to lower a bit more and then gonna grab 48GB and that should see me set for a long long while.

[plexabit]

Waiting for DDR3 prices to lower a bit more and then gonna grab 48GB and that should see me set for a long long while.

New games are 50GB or more now...heh, most should run though

[GoNz0]

Build this into the m.2 format and get the price under £500 and I will buy it.

[MrJim]

Build this into the m.2 format and get the price under £500 and I will buy it.

I watched a 'live event' over at PC Perspective last night, & they had a couple of Intel guys talking about the drive. They said that chip density & heat are two problems with putting a drive like this in the M.2 format. The drive can use up to 24W when writing data. I expect that as 3D NAND becomes more widespread though, these sorts of drives will eventually come to M.2

[zaph0d]

New games are 50GB or more now...heh, most should run though

True but NTFS compression actually gets faster read/write times on ramdrives and might make the difference on making them fit.

[kingpotnoodle]

Really not that pricey, similar to a Plextor M6e Black Edition, Kingston Hyper-X Predator etc and less than an OCZ RevoDrive so pricing is in line with high end PCI-E drives. Sure it's nearly double the price per GB of a basic 512GB SATA but you're getting what you pay for there.

Definitely not something for an M2 stick or laptops though, far too much power usage - but that stems from the server heritage I suppose. I'd be mildly concerned about these in a tight case or a position with limited airflow, higher peak power usage than spinning drives.

[shaithis]

True but NTFS compression actually gets faster read/write times on ramdrives and might make the difference on making them fit.

The bulky parts of games (video, audio and textures) are already compressed. RAM drives for gaming are a fools errand IMO. Price, capacity, up-front load times (90 secs to load the game into RAM? I doubt in an entire play session I load for 90 secs in total most times - your transferring stuff to RAM that you won't actually load in the game)....and then you have memory bandwidth contention that will differ from game to game and system to system.

I remember having a RAMdrive....on my Amiga. I also used one for a while when I moved from Amiga to a 386 with Windows 3.1 and 4MB RAM....both to hold a single floppy disks contents.

Haven't felt the need to use one since.

[whatif]

Hmmm. I still prefer a standard SSD to run OS and run Games and other HDD limited programs from Ramdrives where the image is stored on good old high capacity mech drives.

As an example - it takes me 60-90s to load an 18 gig modded Skyrim image from a pair of Raid0 750GB drives, from that point load times in-game are instant to two seconds. I once benchmarked a 12GB ramdrive and got 4k read/write speeds of about 7GB/s. No SSD can compete with Ram on performance. On Price not so much, I've got 24GB in triple-channel atm with 6 dimms so anything that needs more than 18GB image is right out. Waiting for DDR3 prices to lower a bit more and then gonna grab 48GB and that should see me set for a long long while.

I agree and do similar with 32GB DDR3 2133MHz ram. With the newer DDR4 you can get 128GB ram (OK that will be expensive but with the higher speeds and quad channel it should zip) which will do OK for high end gamers (and those with big wallets) and the speeds should still leave flash drives in the dust. Plus for those with less ram, Dimmdrive allows you to play the game and not have to have all the game on the ram drive.
What do you think?

[kalniel]

I agree and do similar with 32GB DDR3 2133MHz ram. With the newer DDR4 you can get 128GB ram (OK that will be expensive but with the higher speeds and quad channel it should zip) which will do OK for high end gamers (and those with big wallets) and the speeds should still leave flash drives in the dust. Plus for those with less ram, Dimmdrive allows you to play the game and not have to have all the game on the ram drive.
What do you think?

Sounds really silly. You still have to read the data into RAM in the first place, so why not just get an SSD and let superfetch do its stuff?

Game load times don't really benefit from increasing data speeds past a certain point anyway - take an SSD from several years ago and this super fast one reviewed and there's no significant difference.

[abaxas]

The bulky parts of games (video, audio and textures) are already compressed. RAM drives for gaming are a fools errand IMO. Price, capacity, up-front load times (90 secs to load the game into RAM? I doubt in an entire play session I load for 90 secs in total most times - your transferring stuff to RAM that you won't actually load in the game)....and then you have memory bandwidth contention that will differ from game to game and system to system.

I remember having a RAMdrive....on my Amiga. I also used one for a while when I moved from Amiga to a 386 with Windows 3.1 and 4MB RAM....both to hold a single floppy disks contents.

Haven't felt the need to use one since.

TBH zram on linux is awesome providing your have a processor to match.

[Arulmani]

the next big step in SSD..

[JTunn]

Yeah, that speed is incredible, although I'm more excited to see what the competitors are going to come up with. Certainly these are great times to be a PC gamer

[Danzio]

Brilliant to see these coming to review, however the most glaring issue I noticed is with the pricing, Hexus says around £800 uk, Where as scan is selling the item for a smidge over £900, quite a large margin, and could make or break the decision of buying one for some people.