The Intel Optane SSD 900P 280GB Review
by Billy Tallis on October 27, 2017 9:30 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Light
Our Light storage test has relatively more sequential accesses and lower queue depths than The Destroyer or the Heavy test, and it's by far the shortest test overall. It's based largely on applications that aren't highly dependent on storage performance, so this is a test more of application launch times and file load times. This test can be seen as the sum of all the little delays in daily usage, but with the idle times trimmed to 25ms it takes less than half an hour to run. Details of the Light test can be found here. As with the ATSB Heavy test, this test is run with the drive both freshly erased and empty, and after filling the drive with sequential writes.
The Intel Optane SSD 900P doesn't come in first place for overall data rate on the Light test, until the drives are filled and the average data rate of all the flash-based SSDs takes a big hit.
The average and 99th percentile latencies of the Optane SSD on the Light test are on par with the top flash-based SSDs when the test is run on an empty drive. When the drives are filled before the test, the flash-based SSDs slow down enough that the Optane SSD takes first place easily, with an especially wide margin on the 99th percentile latency.
The average read latency of the Optane SSD 900P on the Light test is merely tied for first place, when the test is run on an empty drive. When the drives are filled, the Optane SSD has half the average read latency of anything else. The write latency situation is quite different; whether or not the drives are filled, most of the top flash-based SSDs are able to fit the bursts of writes in their caches and deliver better latency than the uncached writes of the Optane SSD.
The 99th percentile read latency of the Optane SSD 900P on the Light test is tied for first place when the test is run on an empty drive, and leads by more than 60% when the drives are filled before the test. The 99th percentile write latency lags behind the top flash-based SSDs a bit, but nowhere near enough to be noticeable: the latency is still an order of magnitude lower than SATA SSDs.
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Billy Tallis - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
The main power meter failed before the Optane drive arrived. The whole-system power meter was unaffected.lmcd - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
I can't trust your comments either anymore, @jjj. But who's counting?wookie monster - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
Why no write consistency test? I was able to experiment with a prototype Optane drive, and I found that running a long-haul randomly-ordered write test on the Optane drive was substantially faster than the fastest available flash-based SSDs.Billy Tallis - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
I plan to do a lot more to this drive, including steady-state random write comparisons against consumer and enterprise SSDs. There just wasn't time to include more tests in this article. I've only had the drive for six days.wookie monster - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
I look forward to the results, thanks!willis936 - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
I also really like the performance over time plots. An investigation into power and thermals (and potential throttling) would be interesting.takeshi7 - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
It's pretty obvious that once an SSD is installed in the system, game load times are limited by the CPU, not the storage. This is why this Optane drive won't load games significantly faster than a SATA SSD (especially when you consider the price increase). Can Anandtech please test how different CPUs affect game loading times?Scannall - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
For the vast majority out there, this seems like a solution in search of a problem. As expensive as it is, you'd be better off raiding a couple nvme drives and calling it good.ddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
Nope, raid-ing will in no way improve their weak spots - random and low queue depth access. It will only boost sequential and high QD performance, which is already superior to that of hypetane.citrix13 - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
Thank you ddriver for your objective, unbiased and logical observations.Many in here cannot comprehend what you have been saying which is unfortunate.
Your core point is that Intel promised 1000x performance with Intel Optane
Intel did not deliver 1000x performance, they gave orders of magnitude less
Also, i take note that you praised the drives endurance and low queue depth performance and said you may buy it.
Commendation on being able to call a spade a spade, but still being able to see it strengths