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Between each repetition, the storage system is bombarded with a usage that causes degraded drive performance.
Crystal diskmark 950 pro series#
When it comes to random performance, which translates to better real-world performance, Z series systems have a clear advantage as illustrated by these benchmarks run on an Intel P3608. X99 delivers excellent sequential performance, but that isn't nearly as important as random 4K performance. So why not just go with X99 and utilize some of X99's 28-40 CPU lanes for your PCIe SSDs? First, you can't have a bootable PCIe array and also because X99 cannot deliver as good of SSD performance as Z170 whether it be a SATA array or a PCIe array. Second, when routed through the Z170 chipset, you don't give up any of the very limited number of PCIe lanes (16) available on a Z170 based motherboard. First and most importantly, you can have a bootable PCIe array. While DMI 3.0 doesn't deliver enough bandwidth to fully exploit all the performance available from three 950 Pro's, it does have a clear advantage over standard PCIe slots in two ways. You can get slightly more random performance and, of course, more capacity from a three drive array, but it's not enough of a return to make that extra $200-$350 worth it in our opinion. This means that really there isn't much of a reason to utilize more than two 512GB 950 Pro's for a bootable array. The Z170 chipset, however, is limited by DMI 3.0 to about 3.4GB/s sequential performance for read and about 3GB/s for sequential writes. With the Z170 chipset, up to three M.2 PCIe SSDs can be RAIDed into one supremely powerful boot disk. Almost as soon as the PCIe SSDs began to reign supreme, the call for a bootable PCIe RAID array went out, and Intel listened.