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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Meteor2 - Tuesday, October 31, 2017 - link
I always switch to 'read comments as a single page'mapesdhs - Tuesday, October 31, 2017 - link
I've used the scroll wheel so much, I had to buy a new mouse... :}Rektide - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
Does the P4800X self-destruct/go-read-only after it reaches the advertised 20.5 PBW endurance?That's twice what a Samsung 850 Pro managed in a stress test, but the Pro is a consumer class device. The idea that I'd buy some fancy enterprise drive that would stop operation the second it's endurance rating is over makes me fume.
mkozakewich - Monday, October 30, 2017 - link
From what I've heard, they never stop. At that point, they'll be out of warranty, but they'll continue to work at poorer and poorer performance levels.FwFred - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
I see the comments are 50/50 impressed vs not impressed by this review. I also see that ddriver is 50% of the comments 😂Notmyusualid - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
@FwFredIndeed. I thought the drive was amazing. I guess ddriver read some other article.
todd.nonja - Monday, October 30, 2017 - link
I needed a good laugh after wading through the muck that ddriver has been spewing. Thanks for that!mapesdhs - Tuesday, October 31, 2017 - link
Definite lol marker point. :Diwod - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
The price is much cheaper then I thought!. For what it is capable of I think this is actually cheap. This is a first gen ( third ? ) product. So i expect there should still be lots of headroom for improvement. But i still struggle to find the use of it in normal day to day computing.While latency is extremely important, you dont want your system to Jank or halt, but newer SSD is nearly avoided the problem. And as NAND gets cheaper ( Which isn't happening.... ) and better controller, I would call this problem solved.
SSD continues to uses less power, something that is important in Laptop market. And for 99% of our workload we are no longer limited by I/O. As shown in the benchmark with very little performance improvement, why should i get a Optane is an question that needs better answer from Intel.
What i think will be interesting, is the use of Optane SSD on Database server, with those kind of latency, Random Read Write, and Endurance, it think this is going to be a gigantic leap forward.
DanNeely - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
Yup. I was expecting it to be several times more expensive. Still more than I'd be willing to spend if building a new system but only; only because I don't think I could live with only half a TB for long before running low on space, and I don't want to do the multiple drives thing again. (I currently have about 400GB used on a 1 TB SSD). 2nd/3rd gen in 2-4 years when I build my new system I could see dropping $500ish for a ~2TB model if it exists then.