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Assessing the power of Intel’s SSD 750 … but check your motherboard before buying

Solid state-of-the-art 2.4GB/s consumer storage

Review Although SSDs have a huge performance advantage over the good, old-fashioned clattering mechanical drive, they have (up till now) been held back because of their reliance on AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) architecture, developed in 2004 for standard disks and, in particular, SATA interfaced disks.

Intel SSD750 NVMe 1.2TB PCIe SSD

Intel's SSD 750 draws upon its NVMe know-how on it data centre SSDs

At the time, this was fine for high latency spinning disk drives but certainly doesn’t do SSDs any favours with their low latency NAND chips. What was needed was an interface that understands what a SSD is – enter NVMe.

Designed from the ground up to support and exploit both the PCIe bus and the special attributes of NAND flash memory, NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) offers higher performance, lower latencies and has a much smaller command structure than AHCI.

It also supports multiple queues at much higher depths for PCIe attached drives. Designed to be highly scalable and highly parallel, NVMe offers a good degree of future proofing and support for new memory technologies as they develop.

Intel SSD750 NVMe 1.2TB PCIe SSD

Yes, you need a heat sink on this beastie

Intel’s first NVMe drive was the SSD DC P3700, a drive aimed at the enterprise segment with a price tag to match (the 1.6TB PCIe version of the P3700 costs just £3,000) but it did lead to the first NVMe drive for the consumer segment, the SSD 750.

That said, Samsung has recently released a NVMe version of the M.2 SM951 drive.

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