The Intel 750 Series SSD brings never-before-seen performance to the consumer ecosystem. These improvements are enabled by the new NVMe protocol using a PCI-Express interface. Built onto Intel's own CH29AE41AB0 controller, which uses 18-channels—more than twice that of the best consumer SSDs today—our synthetic testing shows incredible performance results with read/write speeds of up to 1.2 GB per second. Real-life performance is affected by the fact that faster storage will not scale 1:1 with real-life workloads because such workloads are not entirely made up of disk transfers. The only exception in our test setup here is the ISO File Copy test that ends up almost 3x as fast as on the fastest competing SSD we tested, which is impressive!
Overall, the Intel 750 Series delivers a respectable 10% performance improvement over the Crucial MX200, the fastest SSD we had tested thus far. What is a bit strange is that MySQL Enterprise testing results are so low, which could be as intended: It is a consumer drive, not one for datacenters.

But not everything is golden with the 750 Series. The use of NVMe requires operating system support, which is built-in on Windows 8 and newer, and older systems can install an Intel driver. While this driver lets you use the SSD in Windows, with its full performance, you can not just magically boot Windows 7 from it even if your motherboard supports UEFI and NVMe. I detailed a lengthy procedure in this article on how you can still get Windows 7 to boot, but it's not the plug-and-play solution that people are used to from SATA. I just hope that this isn't going to increase negative user reviews and RMAs for Intel.

Price-wise, the Intel 750 Series clocks in at around $1 per gigabyte, which is not totally unreasonable, but can't compete with recent SSDs that are down to 40 cents per GB, and none of those are much slower subjectively in real-life unless you copy ISOs all day. The limited range of capacities might also make sales difficult as there is only a 400 GB and 1.2 TB model with nothing in-between, which seems like a weird choice. I currently see the Intel 750 Series as a well-thought-out experiment on Intel's part to test whether there is a demand for such drives. Maybe if you are building an incredibly high-end PC, this could be a drive for you, but consider that it will cost you a PCIe slot, which will probably affect your graphics card choices. As an alternative, Intel also released a 2.5" form factor version with exact the same performance, but it will not work with SATA. It uses SATA Express instead, a connector that's available on modern motherboards, but only with 10 Gb/s, which is too slow. Today, ASUS has also released an adapter for M.2 to SATA Express, which seems to be the ideal choice for the Intel 750 SSD when paired with M.2 20 Gb/s or M.2 32 Gb/s.