The Intel Optane SSD 900P 280GB Review
by Billy Tallis on October 27, 2017 9:30 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy
Our Heavy storage benchmark is proportionally more write-heavy than The Destroyer, but much shorter overall. The total writes in the Heavy test aren't enough to fill the drive, so performance never drops down to steady state. This test is far more representative of a power user's day to day usage, and is heavily influenced by the drive's peak performance. The Heavy workload test details can be found here. This test is run twice, once on a freshly erased drive and once after filling the drive with sequential writes.
The Intel Optane SSD 900P completes the Heavy test with a higher average data rate than any flash-based SSD. Curiously, it performs even better after being filled than it does right after a low-level format. Even the best flash-based SSDs lose a bit of performance when operating with minimal spare area. The Optane SSD by contrast seems to require an extra initialization phase after the format to reach full performance.
As with The Destroyer, the Optane SSD sets records for both average and 99th percentile latency on the Heavy test. The margin for the 99th percentile latency is more significant, with about a 43% improvement over the previous record.
The average write latency of the Optane SSD 900P on the Heavy test comes in as a close second place, while the average read latency sets a new record that is less than half the previous best score.
The Optane SSD's new record for 99th percentile read latency on the Heavy test is 70% lower than the fastest flash-based SSD. The record for 99th percentile write latency is a less impressive 30% improvement over the previous record.
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ddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
You probably missed the slide where intel positions this product at "eSports" - believe it or not, it will make a world of a difference. You may not see even 1% of improvement, but it will definitely make you much better at eSports.But then again, you can get exactly the same benefit from just putting a sticker on your box, without actually paying for the product. It is enough for others to think you have it.
Sarcasm aside, at this price it is a good purchase for database usage. But only if very low latency is required, meaning a local server on a very fast network, and the server is being lightly loaded. For an internet server the advantages will be diminished by the internet connection bottleneck, and for higher loads, as evident from the test results, SSDs do catch up as the QD increases, and still offer significantly lower cost per GB.
lmcd - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
While the endurance shut-off seems pretty ridiculous, I'd imagine as this technology ramps up its density and cost-efficiency it will supplant traditional NAND in the data center before traditional NAND even garners much of a foothold.iwod - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link
I think the reality is 90% of consumers are never going to hit that endurance number, ever. Statiscally speaking, they are much more likely to get a Memory Error, Capacitor malfunction, Power Supply issues or likely their CPU heat cooling system ( Increasingly a problem ) messed up before that number ever arrived.And I think another problem, is Intel cant figure out the best endurance time and method on this new tech. And they are playing it safe then sorry. Running a 10 PB test takes time.
"Bullwinkle J Moose" - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
Thank you ddriverI was going to let the My Banhammer stand until I remembered why I love this site so much...
It's not the articles, it's the comments
You have learned well my friend!
eddman - Sunday, October 29, 2017 - link
Horses attached to the same carriage. Keep pulling.peevee - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
Looks like this thing is fast enough to be used as swap drive for memory-intensive tasks.Reflex - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
This is a good product for those who can benefit from it, and a great start for the first major advance in solid state storage we have seen in many years. Hopefully the price continues to come down, power consumption declines and capacity rises. I will be very interested in seeing whether or not they can achieve the projections that were made when the technology was first announced.Huayra - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
Is it possible to install macOS on it using thunderbolt enclosure connected to a Macbook?Ippokratis - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link
Hi, nice article.1 - Can Optane be used as a scratch disk for Ryzen / Threadripper, OSX /Linux ?
2 - Could you please a compiler (gcc, javascript) benchmark ? Random IOPS are very important in compiling and making compile times shorter is a good reason to buy tech - consider it as a real life test.
Thanks
peevee - Monday, October 30, 2017 - link
Agree with compile test. On 16+ core machine though, not 4 measly cores. And source code which does not all fit in RAM.