What's so great about the Intel 750 PCIe SSD?

When ordering my Origin PC Millenium (specs in sig), I ordered the Intel 750 PCIe SSD as it was the most expensive and I thought that it's the best. In benchmarks it does give some crazy numbers but many users are reporting a delayed boot by up to 25 seconds more due to the slow initialization during bootup of the PCIe SSD.

Also looking at the numbers below in game load times and some programs, it seems to be the slowest:

http://techreport.com/review/28050/intel-750-series-solid-state-drive-reviewed/5

I don't get it, what's so great about it then? what did I get myself into?

 

It is the best.

Not for gaming. Not for mere boot up times. But for productivity in a desktop setting.

Cancel the order or sell it before you use it.

What you did is get yourself in a pickle because buying the most expensive option is not always the best (for us).

 

Having not tested the SSD in question - let alone your rather impressive rig as a whole - I can't possibly answer your question, but will say this much:

Try it. Test it. Beat the living daylight out of it.

And if you end up not liking it, just sell it.

Hopefully it won't come down to that, but that's what we get for acting as unpaid beta testers. I've personally been there and done that more times than I'd like to remember.

Good luck.

 

I agree about testing it and even keeping it for a while to see if Intel issues a firmware/driver that fixes the boot up speed. But logic tells me that this is where it's at now and if boot up and launching apps is your measure of an SSD; then sell it in pristine condition as possible to recover the most $$$ you can.

Just curious... did you get the 400GB or the 1.2TB version?

 

The 1.2TB since the 1.2TB is supposed to have 2GB of DRAM vs 1GB only for the 400GB version.

Let me talk to Origin today and see if they can change it into something else.

 

Interesting post from Sean Webster from OC Forums:

 

Anandtech's review of the Samsung SM951 mentioned that Intel's 750 is designed to be most efficient and best performing in steady state, which happens with prolonged workstation use as mentioned and probably most of the stuff tiller does. It falls behind drives like Samsung's SM951 in burst performance, which is what those drives are tuned for and represents most types of typical personal and business use - web browsing, productivity, gaming, and simple transfers.

 

I am so confused, it is the highest performance SSD no doubt about that, it performs like two SSDs in RAId but is actually a single one. The only downfall is its boot time. Can't imagine why Intel would kill the performance of this SSD by hindering its boot time so badly yet to my surprise, it remains as the ORIGIN PC recommended drive when trying to build a system and even XOTIC PC has just addded it to their SSD lineup when configuring a system just recently......

 

Of course it's the recommended drive by Origin PC... you just increased their sales by a whopping percentage!

In the past, I've mentioned that I've had and played with systems that seemed to have no snap at all - and these were $10K to $20K desktop builds. But what they had was real performance for the tasks they were built for.

Intel SSD's are like that to me. While they may seem to falter compared to other SSD examples - they are in fact the real workhorses when it comes down to crunch time.

Another (even more expensive... ) option would be to use a different SSD boot drive for the O/S and Programs and use the Intel 750 as your second drive for more workstation class workloads. Of course, even this isn't guaranteed to increase boot up times, but it is something to consider.

If Origin PC allows you a full refund after a week/month after you receive it - I would still be tempted to play with it first, instead of just writing it off from a few synth bm's.

 

I just called their tech support telling them about this concern and they told me they have never had any complaints with regards to slow boot time.

I'll just let them complete the build and worst case scenario I'll just sell it if I don't like it because any change I make will just slow down the delivery date and I'm tired of waiting

 

I suggest you play with it for a while and if you don't like it, return it. Intel may issue a firmware update to deal with it though, depends how patient you are and much of a gambling man you are. This is just one of those things that comes with being a first adopter. Me personally, I like to sit back and watch the guinea pigs do the teething then pick up whatever was tested, tried and true.

What did you do with your M18x?

 

oh it's an Alienware 18 not M18x, still here, posted it on the local news to sell it but nothing yet since it is highly specced and thus it ain't going for cheap. I'd rather let it collect dust than sell it for dirt cheap. It's in mint condition, 4940MX CPU + 32GB 1866 MHz RAM + 2x 780M GTX in SLI + 1TB mSATA 840 EVO + 1.5TB 5400 RPM HDDs

 

Reply from one d00d at Anandtech forums:

"I think this issue is related to older motherboards which need to load a driver to boot from PCIe or that don't natively support AHCI over PCIe. If you've got a newer UEFI board, I don't think you'll have this issue."

That hopefully brings a positive vibe that it would work ok without slow boot

 

pcie drives don't have slow boots times compared to sata drives. if you're experiencing this, it's due to a bug/issue somewhere on the system.