PC World – December 2015

REVIEWS
& RATINGS
Having previously experienced only the Plextor, Kingston, and XP941
AHCI drives, we were surprised and pleased to see that the SM951 AHCI
was competitive with its NVMe sibling. Also note that in our real-life
20GB tests, the Kingston proved almost as fast as either Samsung drive.
We’ve seen well over 2GBps from Intel’s 750 series NVMe PCIe card
(go.pcworld.com/nvme750) drive, which plugs into an open PCIe slot
like a video card (an alternative to M.2 that desktop users should
consider), so the SM951 NVMe may not be showing the full potential
of NVMe. Intel told us it didn’t produce an M.2 version of the 750
because at top speed, the power draw exceeded what’s available from
M.2 slots. Basically, not all the ducks are in a row yet to fairly evaluate
AHCI versus NVMe. It is safe, however, to say that PCIe SSDs obliterate
their SATA cousins in terms of raw sequential throughput. They also
occupy a slot in your motherboard.
Here are the details on the drives
involved in the testing.
Intel 530 360 GB $300
This is a decent drive for, say, an older NUC, or small-form-factor PC.
But it’s still SATA and only a 500MBps/300MBps reader/writer
at that. That’s certainly enough for the average user, and far faster
than a hard drive, but not a product for enthusiasts. The biggest issue
is that the 530 series appears still to be priced at about 80 cents per
gigabyte—roughly twice what you’ll pay for the
faster Samsung 850 EVO M.2.
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