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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ddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
Yeah, and now you will either get crucified for straying from the herd, or you will be labeled a fake account I made to compliment myself :)It is not really worth the trouble you know, I don't care about approval.
lmcd - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
I bet you also are advocating against future upgrades to Anandtech's comment system, with which even a crowd as small as Anandtech's would use to bury your unwanted, pointless, and untruthful comments.Reflex - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
Optane is a technology.Today's article is about a product, which happens to use Optane in combination with other technologies.
Intel's statements about Optane were about the capabilities of the technology. And indeed, for those who know much about PCM they were reasonable statements.
Actual products are not guaranteed to maximize the ultimate potential of a given technology, especially in their first revisions. In 1995 when most motherboards were transitioning from a BIOS ROM to a Flash BIOS, a company could have stated that the potential for Flash was 1000x the performance of the older ROM based technologies. And they would have been correct. Even though the earlier Flash devices achieved speeds only of a couple MB/sec.
Flash BIOS chips were a product. Flash, NAND or NOR, are technologies. Those technologies had major potential which has been largely realized over the two decades since that time. Products have gotten better as supporting technologies have improved (such as controllers and bus interfaces) and predicted improvements in Flash were made (die shrinks, power optimization, parallelization, die stacking, etc). That does not make any of the early PR about the technology inaccurate, or even misleading. It was all true and over time it was demonstrated.
Intel stated the potential of Optane. Two years later they have started releasing products based on it. None are yet capable of reaching its stated potential, after all a 1000x performance improvement would exceed the bandwidth of any connected bus, much less the controllers in their current state and likely the current manufacturing technologies. But they launched with what is undoubtedly the fastest storage device on the market by a significant margin, with reliability that is multiples of any competing technology, and a cost that is significantly lower than expected for such a halo product.
That is a very successful launch. And given what they have stated Optane is capable of (all reasonable targets for PCM), I am optimistic about the future.
And I am glad Samsung will have competition again. The market has stagnated both in price and capacity.
looncraz - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
I have a specific workload that can (at peak sustained) can read 3~4GB/s and write out about 1.5~2.0GB/s from storage (at the same time to different drives - some data to/from GPU, some to/from CPU). Optane would actually slow me down quite a bit.The 4KiB block size is simply not an issue that requires solving any more. Software adapted already.
Manch - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
Out of 6 pages of comments that idiot rambles on and on for 5 of them. I'm pleading with the UK government to reevaluate and censure the internet usage of their crazies......JTMC.....just shut up.Reflex - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
I miss the days when we had intelligent commentators on articles here.ddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
You mean the days you didn't have them and still had the idyllic, innocent, ignorant garden of tech Eden, where feeling intelligent was as easy as posting a "great review, great product, me want" comment.Funny story, I evidently didn't have a point of reference until recently, when I visited the comment section at wccftech. Now, after having see that, I do also see how you could cultivate the illusion that the AT comment section may appear to be intelligent, if only relative to that random offtopic pic trolling, but I can assure you, there is no intellect in "on-topic sucking up".
You definitely have a problem with factual intelligence, and that problem has to do with realizing it is something that you do not posses. Which makes you cranky. You do have a choice thou, you can remain antagonistic to actual intelligence in order to protect your lack thereof and hold on to the much more easily attainable illusion of it, or you can take steps to acquire intelligence for real, but I warn you, it will change your world forever.
And just to let you know, you can become intelligent without becoming an ass like me. Those are two different traits, not related to each other.
lmcd - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
Honestly, if you've got so much experience in the field, you should spend more time in it. You're clearly excessively valuable and should not waste your talents talking to such unintelligent plebian commenters.Reflex - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
Yes, obviously prior to your arrival no one writing for or commenting on this site or its articles had any in depth knowledge of technology. Thank goodness you finally arrived to enlighten us all. I have no idea how the technology industry, writers and community even managed to invent the pocket calculator before you arrived.mkozakewich - Monday, October 30, 2017 - link
When you see their names, just scroll past the entire message thread. It'll save you a lot of time and sanity.(I agree, though; it was annoying scrolling through four or five pages!)