Is the i750 dead in the water?

[etherealfocus]

960 Pro and even the 960 Evo mostly murder the Intel 750 on performance. 960 Evo is ~50c/GB, 960 Pro is ~63c/GB, and i750 is 60-80c/GB (probably the 1TB at 60c is more popular for intended use cases...?)

Given that the i750 gets killed on performance, similar to higher cost, and is only arguably more reliable... does it still have a space in the market? I guess it has a native PCIe slot interface and avoids the need for potentially sketchy adapters...

 

[Valantar]

I would say the 750 was a dead/dying product long before the launch of the 960 series at all. It competed okay with the 950, but still lost. It never could compete on price either as it's based on a high-cost enterprise platform, not to mention impractical form factors.

The 750 was never more than a stop-gap product. I doubt it ever was intended to be anything else. If I were to guess, Intel was betting on being able to launch competitive 3D NAND drives earlier this year. Instead, their NAND is underperforming and there are no great controllers available. Thus, we still have the 750, and their only new product is the low-end 600p.

OTOH, the 750 kicked the 950's ass in certain specific metrics, so I would guess it's been popular with users in need of particular kinds of performance. The problem is just that these were metrics far outside of regular enthusiast usage.

 

[etherealfocus]

I think some of the i750's wins were due to lack of throttling - likely related to bigger form factor with better circulation. I was a little disappointed that AT (IIRC) tested the 950P against the 750 and also reviewed a couple M.2 heatsinks, but never did a direct H2H to confirm that 950P + HSF beat the i750 more or less across the board.

Looks like M.2 is part of the Open Compute Project and OCP2 spec now so hopefully it'll trickle down to the SMB market relatively quickly. Speaking of which, is there a server-grade RAID solution for M.2 yet? Say, neighborhood of an LSI 9300.

No, I'm not touching either mobo raid or that Startech card
https://www.startech.com/Cards-Adap...TA-Cards/m2-raid-controller-card~PEXM2SAT3422