Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X 750GB Hands-On Review
by Billy Tallis on November 9, 2017 12:00 PM ESTConclusion
There aren't really any surprises to this review. As promised, the Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X 750GB performs about the same as the 375GB model we tested earlier this year, which puts it far above the flash-based competition. The doubling of the drive's capacity has brought it up to a far more usable level where it can more easily be regarded as either an expansion of memory or as a reasonably large storage device that is extremely fast.
The Optane SSD DC P4800X is not a one size fits all enterprise SSD, but for certain use cases it has almost no competition. SSDs using SLC NAND once offered latency close to the Optane SSD, but their high prices made them a niche product that most manufacturers decided wasn't viable. 3D XPoint memory is significantly more expensive than current 3D MLC and 3D TLC NAND flash memory, but the low latency and high performance consistency it enables have a place in today's enterprise SSD market.
Testing the ostensibly consumer-oriented Optane SSD 900p in the context of enterprise storage reveals the 900p to be just as competent in the performance department. There are several enterprise-class features missing from the 900p, most notably support for different sector sizes with protection metadata. Support for out of band management and is more of a convenience than a necessity except in large scale cloud hosting deployments. The missing enterprise features are not a showstopper for every enterprise customer. Otherwise, the 900p is roughly the P4800X in different capacities with a lower write endurance rating and a proportionally lower price. The 900p is essentially an entry-level Optane enterprise SSD, with a value proposition that is at least as attractive as the Optane P4800X.
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tuxRoller - Friday, November 10, 2017 - link
Since this is for enterprise, the os vendor would be the one responsible (so, yes, third party) and one of the reasons why you pay them ridiculous support fees is for them to be your single point of contact for most issues.tuxRoller - Friday, November 10, 2017 - link
Very nice write-up.Might it be possible for us to get an idea of the difference in cell access times by running a couple tests on a loop device, and, even better, purely dram-based storage accessed over pcie?
Pork@III - Friday, November 10, 2017 - link
Has no normal only speed test? What are these creepy creations of this vc that?romrunning - Friday, November 10, 2017 - link
Is there any tests of the 4800X in a virtual host? Either Hyper-V or ESX, running multiple server OS clients with a variety of workloads. With the kind of low latency shown, I'd love to see how much more responsive Optane is compared to all flash storage like a P3608. Sort of a" rising tide floats all ships" kind of improvement, I hope.Klimax - Sunday, November 12, 2017 - link
That's nice review. How about some test using Windows too. (Aka something with more advanced I/O subsystem)Billy Tallis - Monday, November 13, 2017 - link
I'm not sure what you mean. Nobody seriously considers the Windows I/O system to be more advanced than what Linux provides. Even Intel's documentation states that the best latency they can get out of the Optane SSD on Windows is a few microseconds slower than on the Linux NVMe driver, and on Linux a few more microseconds can be saved using SPDK.tuxRoller - Tuesday, November 14, 2017 - link
"Advanced" may be the wrong way to look at it because ntkrnl can perform both sync and async operations, while Linux is essentially a sync-based kernel (the limitations surrounding its aio system are legendary). However, by focusing on doing that one thing well the block subsystem has become highly optimized for enterprise workloads.Btw, is there any chance you could run that block system (and nvme protocol, if possible) overhead test i asked about?