The Intel Optane SSD 900P 280GB Review
by Billy Tallis on October 27, 2017 9:30 AM ESTConclusion
The Intel Optane SSD 900P is an amazing piece of technology, but one whose benefits are difficult to fully enjoy. Its 3D XPoint memory enables it to break almost all the performance records, but some where difference to Optane SSD performance is too small to justify paying more than twice the price per GB. However, there are some scenarios where the Optane SSD absolutely blows away the competition and justifies its premium.
The low queue depth random read performance of the Optane SSD is several times faster than any flash-based SSD has attained. Mixed workloads that include a substantial component of random read operations also perform quite well, and throwing some write operations into a stream of reads barely impacts the read performance.
The Optane SSD 900P has enough space to be used as general-purpose storage, and larger capacity models can be introduced as necessary. There's no need to tangle with Intel's caching software and its associated platform lock-in as with the Optane Memory modules.
The biggest problem the Optane SSD 900P faces today is that few desktop users have workloads that stress the storage system enough for the Optane SSD to shine. Mechanical hard drives have not disappeared from use as primary storage, and most software for desktop and workstation use is still designed with their performance limitations in mind. If budget SSDs had relegated hard drives to backup and archival use years ago, then the software landscape would probably be more ready to take advantage of the speed offered by the Optane SSD 900P. Instead, the Optane SSD as a consumer/prosumer product only makes sense in a few niches. Most users- even those with relatively intense storage performance needs - will be better served by high quality flash SSDs like the Samsung 960 PRO.
The price of the Intel Optane SSD 900P is accessible enough that many enthusiasts will pay the premium to have the bragging rights of the fastest SSD money can buy. Workstation users who have massive datasets that don't fit in RAM will jump at the chance to buy a faster scratch drive. And if that isn't enough to clear the shelves, then enterprise customers who need high performance but don't need the extreme write endurance of the Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X can get the 900P with its solid 10 DWPD endurance rating for a third the price per GB. The Optane SSD 900P isn't for everybody, but it will nonetheless be a successful product, and Intel won't have any trouble selling them.
The long-term prospects for Intel's Optane SSDs look pretty good, too. The pricing doesn't leave Samsung a lot of room to introduce a Z-NAND based consumer SSD. No other alternative nonvolatile memory technology is close to being ready to challenge 3D XPoint. Intel could improve the sequential transfer speeds, but they're good enough for now. They'll need to deliver a big jump in performance when they adopt PCIe Gen 4, but that shouldn't be a challenge: increasing the controller's channel count from 7 to the 12 channels used by their current NAND flash controller or the 18 used by their first NVMe controller will bring plenty of extra throughput. The only question will then be over the power consumption. The latency is already close to being as low as possible over a PCIe link, and NVDIMMs with 3D XPoint won't be making Optane SSDs obsolete in the consumer market anytime soon.
In many ways, the performance profile of the Optane SSD is far simpler than that of NAND flash based SSDs. The Optane SSD 900P performs just as well when it is full as when it is almost empty. It performs quite consistently over time, with far fewer high-latency outliers thanks to the lack of garbage collection stalls. Unlike with flash-based SSDs, it is not necessary to buy the largest model to get the highest possible performance; the 280GB model we tested should be very similar to the 480GB model (which we're waiting for review). It doesn't matter whether TRIM commands are used, and it's never necessary to perform a secure erase operation to restore degraded performance.
Intel has almost taken all the fun out of testing a SSD.
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lmcd - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
Funny, when SSDs came out we were promised they'd be orders of magnitude faster than mechanical HDDs. The first ones weren't.Drumsticks - Sunday, October 29, 2017 - link
I think my primary point of criticism with your view is that, despite Intel not reaching their goals, it is measurably better than the competition at a better price per GB per performance.It might not have hit the endurance targets they wanted, but for 2-3x the cost of your opponent, they've achieved some 20x endurance, on par in the worst case, and 6-8 times better in many measurably important scenarios.
On top of that, you tout the benefits of SLC and claim that SLC is undeniably faster than XPoint, because if SLC wasn't held back by the cheap and underpowered controllers of yesteryear, it could really fly. How do you know the same thing is not true of 3DXP? Perhaps better understanding of its use and a better controller, and maybe a second generation of the memory, will enable Intel to reach even higher performance and endurance heights. You can't claim that SLC is better, and is simply held back by 2014 era controllers, while not allowing that 3DXP could likely be held back by it's controller as well. We have no idea what the performance ceiling for 3DXP is, because we've seen all of one generation of products.
To extend your analogy, I might be disappointed if I only received $450, but if everybody else is still only making $200, I'm going to go home happy.
Rektide - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
This shows an Intel 900P with a total write endurance of 8.7PB, and a 850 Pro with a total write endurance of 150 TB. But a stress test of a 850 Pro in fact survived 9.1 PB[1]! Meanwhile, if you reach 8.7PB on the 900P, Intel will forcibly move your drive into read-only mode.If you look at Ark, Intel describes it's Endurance Rating to mean "Endurance rating indicates the expected data storage cycles to be expected over the life of the device." When they say that, they mean "and not a megabyte more". Whereas when Samsung says it, they, at least once, meant "but this drive may go 60x more than it's rating". I really severely dislike this twist of the knife, this drastic change Intel and Intel alone is perpetrating against it's consumers.
Does the P4800X also commit seppuku the megabyte it reaches it's Endurance Lifetime? I'm not sure if all Intel drives are so malicious, or is it consumer & enthusiast drives? How do I know which drives are programmed to self destruct on me, Intel?
[1] http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/endurance-test-of...
ddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
It is actually worse than locking in read-only mode - on the next boot cycle the drive gets bricked. So if you didn't manage to get that data in time, it is gone forever. Great feature.Spunjji - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link
I have seen this with Intel consumer SSDs. It's amazing - it doesn't even tell you that it's failing and that you have one (yes, one) chance to backup your data before it goes forever. Usually the drive just throws an error, so your average user reboots the system and bam, the drive's not even in the BIOS anymore.Their drive failure behaviour is criminal.
voicequal - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link
Agreed - bricking is a terrible failure mode for a consumer drive. For an enterprise drive, it *might* make sense, since its you want things to fail hard and fast so that backup systems can detect and take over.FwFred - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
Wow, need a block button to improve SnR.Meteor2 - Tuesday, October 31, 2017 - link
Indeed -- though I simply skip any comments written by ddriver. Never any value in them (but a remarkably effective troll).Lolimaster - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link
The 1000X was supposed to be on latency and endurance, not much more, and maybe 10X random 4K performance.CajunArson - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
I thought you were a reliable AMD koolaid drinker?It's funny how you insult these products that you have never used but would never in a million years hurl their $7000 Radeon SSG under the bus... you know, the one that uses a consumer-grade GPU slapped together with a RAID-0 array of cheap consumer-grade NVME drives to supposedly do rendering jobs faster than a regular GPU.