Intel Z170 Board with Three Intel 750 SSDs Equals Ludicrous Speed

By Nathan Kirsch

Earlier this month ASRock released a press release that showed off their USB 3.1 front panel, but further down in that press release were also the test results for a 3-way RAID 0 setup using their latest U.2 kit (M.2 to U.2 adapter). ASRocks U.2 Kit is a tiny add-on card that is installed into an onboard PCIe Gen3 x 4 Ultra M.2 slot transforming the traditional M.2 slot into one that supports a Mini-SAS HD connector (also known as a U.2 PCIe 3.0 x4 slot). This means you’ll be able to support the fastest Intel SSD 750 series SSDs!

asrock u2 kit

After looking closer at the picture ASRock used in the press release (below) it’s fairly obvious that the upcoming ASRock Z170 Extreme 7 motherboard was being used, so we have one of the first glimpses at some of the improved storage performance capabilities that Intel Z170 boards will be offering. For example some boards will feature three M.2 PCIe slots and obviously the Z170 PCH now supports PCIe Gen 3 lanes as ASRock is using 12 of them on the ASRock Z170 Extreme 7 motherboard. Each M.2 slot is capable of 32 Gbps (4000 MB/s), so this should allow for some interesting storage numbers provided the DMI 3 connection to the CPU isn’t limiting the performance.

ASrock U.2 Kit

ASRock used three Intel SSD 750 NVMe 1.2TB drives (Intel SSDPE2MW01) in RAID for the demo and was able to reach sequential read speeds of 3561 MB/s and 3245 MB/s write. One of the Intel SSD 750 1.2TB NVMe drives is capable of 2400 MB/s read and 1200 MB/s write, so looks like something is limiting the read speeds to ~3500 MB/s, but the write speed is scaling as expected. You can check out our review on one Intel SSD 750 NVMe 1.2TB SSD here if you’d like to know more about Intel’s fastest NVMe storage drive.

U2 adapter z170

We are excited to learn that you’ll be able to run multiple M.2 drives for some insane speeds and it will be very interesting to see what is limiting the sequential read speeds, but it’s likely the Direct Media Interface (DMI) as DMI 3.0 runs at 8 GT/s and there are likely four PCIe Gen 3 lanes being used for the DMI 3.0 path between Skylake and the Z170 PCH. Since PCIe Gen 3 lanes top out at 8 GT/s or 985MB/s you are looking at a theoretical speed cap at 3940 MB/s. ASRock is hitting just shy of 3600 MB/s and by the time you factor in the overhead that makes sense why we are seeing performance top out at 3600 MB/s and not any higher as one might think when putting three drives in RAID that each have a 2400 MB/s sequential read speed!

It will be interesting to see how many U.2 adapters ASRock includes with their Intel Z170 boards and how much they’ll cost if you need to buy them.