The Intel SSD 760p 512GB Review: Mainstream NVMe Done Right

AnandTech Storage Bench - The Destroyer

The Destroyer is an extremely long test replicating the access patterns of very IO-intensive desktop usage. A detailed breakdown can be found in this article. Like real-world usage, the drives do get the occasional break that allows for some background garbage collection and flushing caches, but those idle times are limited to 25ms so that it doesn't take all week to run the test. These AnandTech Storage Bench (ATSB) tests do not involve running the actual applications that generated the workloads, so the scores are relatively insensitive to changes in CPU performance and RAM from our new testbed, but the jump to a newer version of Windows and the newer storage drivers can have an impact.

We quantify performance on this test by reporting the drive's average data throughput, the average latency of the I/O operations, and the total energy used by the drive over the course of the test.

The Intel SSD 760p falls on the good side of a big gap in average data rate scores on The Destroyer. Scoring far below the 760p are SATA drives and most earlier entry-level NVMe SSDs. The 760p is a bit slower than some of the drives using planar MLC NAND or 3D TLC NAND, but it is clear that the 760p is capable of handling The Destroyer better than any previous SSD in its price range.

The average and 99th percentile latency scores don't provide the clear separation that the average data rate shows, so the Intel 760p simply looks a bit below average for a NVMe SSD. Given the relative pricing and the poor performance of the Intel 600p, that's a good result for the 760p.

Breaking down the average latency by reads and writes, the Intel SSD 760p ranks about the same either way. It is roughly on par with the slower (read: not Samsung) MLC NVMe SSDs.

The 99th percentile read latency of the Intel SSD 760p on The Destroyer is rather poor, and the 99th percentile write latency isn't great either. The 760p doesn't seem to have serious problems with garbage collection pauses, but The Destroyer definitely does stress the 760p.

The energy consumption of the Intel SSD 760p during The Destroyer is almost as low as Samsung's best NVMe SSDs, but nowhere near the SATA-like efficiency of the Toshiba XG5. Overall, the 760p is much more efficient than Intel's previous NVMe SSDs, but there's still room for improvement.