Iometer
A better examination would be to look at what happens when the drive is bombarded with large-file-size sequential throughput and small-file random reads and writes. By doing this we can expose any weakness in the controller and NAND setup.
The drives go through an hour of preconditioning before running the benchmarks below.
Sequential results mirror what we have seen in other benchmarks - the SSD 750 is very fast when moving large files around, and faster than the official specifications.
Dropping down to using 4K files in 100 per cent random reading and writing scenarios brings latency and throughput into play, where NVMe should work well.
These IOPS tests are run for 20 minutes each and show that, as one would presume, NVMe + PCIe x4 + an enthusiast controller/NAND combination delivers excellent results. The Intel SSD 750 is a harbinger of performance to come. The IOPS figure drops to 282K if we choose a 70/30 mix of 4K reads and writes, corresponding to 1,152MB/s throughput.
Does the drive feel faster than a well-tuned SATA in a Windows environment? We ran a rudimentary test of making a copy of a 59.3GB/3,271-file folder - a two-game Steam one - back on to the same drive, timing the process along the way. Such a test brings all facets of storage into play. The Crucial MX200 drive took 605 seconds (98MB/s) while the Intel SSD 750 accomplished the task in 99s (599MB/s).
