Intel SSD 750 Series 1.2 TiB Review

Introduction

With the need for faster SSDs, high performance market is leaving behind the 2.5 inches models with SATA-600 interface, which obviously limit the bandwidth of these devices to 600 MB/s. One of these high performance SSDs is the 1.2 TB Intel SSD 750 Series, which uses the NVMe standard, PCI Express 3.0 x4 interface and promises to deliver read speeds up to 2,400 MB/s and write speeds up to 1,200 MB/s. Let’s test this SSD.
The 750 Series SSDs can be found in two form factors: a PCI Express 3.0 x4 expansion card or a 2.5” drive with SFF-8639 interface (and thus, with different connectors from the 2,5” SATA drives). The avalilable capacities are 400 GiB and 1.2 TiB. The 2.5” version needs a special cable and a compatible motherboard with dual SATA Express connection.
The SSD 750 Series is, according to Intel, the first model targeted to consumer market to use the NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) specification, which replaces the AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) standard, which was developed and optimized for SATA hard disk drives and replaced the IDE standard. This interface allows higher speeds and lower latencies than the earlier standards, and works better with parallelism.
An important detail is that Windows 7 has no native support to NVMe, so it will need a driver to work with it. In order to install this operating system in an NVMe SSD, you will need this driver (on an USB stick, for example) at the installing time. It is also necessary that your motherboard BIOS offers NVMe support. We managed to install Windows 7 on the Intel SSD 750 Series 1.2 TiB with no hassle, just by providing the NVMe driver on an USB thumb drive. Windows 8.1, Windows 10, and newer Linux distributions, however, offer native NVMe support.
In our tests, we will compare the Intel SSD 750 Series 1.2 TiB to the Kingston HyperX Predator 480 GiB, which we tested recently. However, it is important to keep in mind that those two drives are not direct competitors, because they have not the same capacity (we don’t have another 1.2 TiB competitor SSD in our lab to compare), and also because they are in different price ranges (see table below). So, we are comparing them just to have an idea of the performance of the reviewed SSD.
Before proceeding, we highly suggest that you read our “Anatomy of SSD Units” tutorial, which provides all the background information you need to know about SSDs.
In the table below we compare the units tested.

We researched the prices on the day that we published this review. In the table below, we provide a more in-depth technical comparison between the two drives.