Intel 750 SSD - NVMe works natively

[dokwine]

I changed sector size to 4k and have not had to make other changes - its been very stable. Sorry, no benchmark numbers for you.

 

[thedocbwarren]

How do you change that (windows format?) I don't have Windows so I'm wondering if this is possible with Linux or such.

How's the performance? Is it decent. Sounds like there might be some driver trickery on the Intel side. Researching at the moment as these are very expensive drives.

I changed sector size to 4k and have not had to make other changes - its been very stable. Sorry, no benchmark numbers for you.

 

[dokwine]

No particular trickery - Intel ships with 512 byte sectors and Macs need 4k. Sorry, I think Win is the only way. I had to create a Win image to do it, then get the free tools from Intel per instructions earlier in this thread. Again, no benchmarks.

 

[thedocbwarren]

hmmm ok.I can manage that if I need to. I'm curious on your blackmagic speeds. I get 2.5K on my 950 Pro (and I have yet to use on macOS.)

I might try one of these anyway for gits and shiggles.

 

[dokwine]

Didn't put any time into this, but this looks like what I get from standard SSD's. I expect there's something other than the drive performance thats the limiting factor here.

 

[RehabMan]

Curious if anyone has had any additional luck with these drives. I'm considering a rebuild and looking for less troublesome NVME for that build. The 750 comes to mind but if it's getting SATA III speeds why bother. I'm not thrilled about the long procedure of the other NVME drives.

I think the Toshiba/OCZ drives have the ability to change to 4k LBA and they don't suffer the performance issues that the Intel drives do with NVMe standard drivers.

 

[thedocbwarren]

hmm looks like it. I might give this one a try. For what it's worth dokwine bench results are better than normal SSD through SATA. I'll try verifying the Toshiba drive and see if this can also use native support.

 

[thedocbwarren]

Ok about to try this. I'm going to put another SSD for the Windows partition on this test box. I did get the Toshiba drive so I'm unclear the intel tools are going to work.

I changed sector size to 4k and have not had to make other changes - its been very stable. Sorry, no benchmark numbers for you.

 

[RehabMan]

Ok about to try this. I'm going to put another SSD for the Windows partition on this test box. I did get the Toshiba drive so I'm unclear the intel tools are going to work.

You should probably use the nvme/smartctl tools available in Linux instead.

 

[thedocbwarren]

I think those are for monitoring vs making any changes to the drive but I'm not 100% sure. I've reviewed the docs and don't see anything that indicates I can reformat the drive to 4k sectors.

You should probably use the nvme/smartctl tools available in Linux instead.