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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Lolimaster - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link
Optane seems like a Joke not only in endurance, performance, but not power consumption too. Right now it's basically a bot for random 4K, you don't really need that, get the 960EVO/PRO.Lolimaster - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link
*now.AnnonymousCoward - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link
Why are you saying get the 960 PRO? It costs double a normal SSD and performs the same in real-world. Please enlighten me.SunnyNW - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link
Would system start-up be any faster?Lolimaster - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link
Probably yes since it has higher random 4k read and latency. Wanna check the limit, search those old ramdisk booting times. Above that we would need a boot disk of L3 cache memory class, then one made up of L2 cache memory class, edram, etc.Lolimaster - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link
Till you reach L1 cache memory class or sram."Bullwinkle J Moose" - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link
That depends....How fast is Fast?
I've seen people bragging on youtube that their new 90+ Watt Quadcore Intel CPU will boot Win 10 to an M.2 EVO drive in 17-20 seconds....
But my 35 Watt dualcore Sandy bridge will boot Windows 10 Fall Crappers Edition (Sept 2017) to an 850 Pro in 5.35 seconds.....
or, the same machine will boot Windows XP-SP2 to the same 850 Pro in 3 - 4 seconds (Varies sleightly every boot)
So, how fast is fast?
jabber - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link
Good luck to the couple of dozen or so that will be able to make proper use of this and notice a difference over a 850 EVO .Pork@III - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link
Do fast? Yes it is fast. Has volume? - Nope.I maked install of operation system and come to install FM7 on 128GB SSD and instalator say me: "not enough space". :(
nOOky - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link
The 280 gig drive is priced similarly to the Samsung 830 Pro 256 gig when it came out if you're thinking the price is outrageous...