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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dbartley - Friday, November 3, 2017 - link
This guy is just a troll and a clown.ddriver - how many Optane reviews in the past 6 months have you commented on making the same arguments? I have seen you on at least 3 other sites making the same nonsensical argument about SLC SSDs. How many times has it been communicated to you that the "1000x" claim is based on the theoretical performance of the 3d Xpoint technology, not the performance of the first rollout of the product.
Trust me, a good troll is fun every once in a while, but dude get a life.
royrkval - Thursday, December 7, 2017 - link
When a thread is blocking on IO it shows up as 100% utilized.Aymincendiary1 - Tuesday, May 8, 2018 - link
Anybody know how to get Windows to recognize this drive as a system drive? I get an error from Windows saying it cannot install onto this partition - I have 260 GB of unpartitioned space available. It is not anything in the motherboard as i already called ASUS on this issue for thier WS x299 PRO/SE board. I didn't have this problem three years ago with Intel's HHHL NVMe drive. Windows 10 Preview as well as a licensed copy installed right away with no fuss.extide - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
Well, damn that thing is fast! I want one!Flunk - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
Wow, after all the talk about the price I was expecting $1000+ for the 480GB. The pricing on this is definitely on the money and the performance is clearly on a whole new level.But... in most client loads you'll never see it. I'd probably buy one anyway, but there is a good argument to be made just to save some cash and get the Samsung 960 PRO, which is by far the best consumer flash drive currently available.
extide - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
I agree, the price is actually pretty decent. It's ~ 1/2 the price per gig than the first SSD I bought years ago.AnnonymousCoward - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link
WTF are you guys talking about. The 960 Pro is 2x the cost of an MX300! Probably worse reliability too, based on the "They're all dead" SSD review. I don't know why you guys and the author are so hung up on the stupid 960 Pro, a serious ripoff (unless you're a part of the 0.1% of users who would use it in a way to see superior performance).mapesdhs - Tuesday, October 31, 2017 - link
#include <troll.h>AnnonymousCoward - Sunday, November 12, 2017 - link
Again, WTF. The above 2 posters said the 960 PRO is a decent price and "by far the best consumer flash drive currently available". They are wrong, as it's 2x the cost of drives that perform the same. This is worth pointing out. That doesn't make me a troll. The 2 posters should thank me for the information. Wise people like information.BrokenCrayons - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
Optane's first consumer storage drive looks very promising. That endurance is crazy impressive and is the change the industry needs to get us moving in a better direction than NAND. The prices are reasonable for the capacity and performance, but I'd like to see reductions in power consumption and (probably) heat output so its realistic to get 3D XPoint inside laptops.