The Intel Optane SSD 900P 280GB Review
by Billy Tallis on October 27, 2017 9:30 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - The Destroyer
The Destroyer is an extremely long test replicating the access patterns of very IO-intensive desktop usage. A detailed breakdown can be found in this article. Like real-world usage, the drives do get the occasional break that allows for some background garbage collection and flushing caches, but those idle times are limited to 25ms so that it doesn't take all week to run the test. These AnandTech Storage Bench (ATSB) tests do not involve running the actual applications that generated the workloads, so the scores are relatively insensitive to changes in CPU performance and RAM from our new testbed, but the jump to a newer version of Windows and the newer storage drivers can have an impact.
We quantify performance on this test by reporting the drive's average data throughput, the average latency of the I/O operations, and the total energy used by the drive over the course of the test.
The Intel Optane SSD 900P sets a new record for average data rate on The Destroyer, beating the Samsung 960 PRO 2TB's score by about 10%, and beating the more similarly-priced 512GB 960 PRO by about 23%.
The average latency of the Optane SSD 900P on The Destroyer is a modest improvement over the previous record. The 99th percentile latency is a more significant 60% reduction over the previous record, putting the Optane SSD more clearly in a separate performance consistency class from high-end flash-based SSDs.
The average read latency of the Optane SSD 900P on The Destroyer is less than half that of any flash-based SSD, but the average write latency is a bit slower than the fastest flash-based SSDs.
Even though the Optane SSD didn't set a record for average write latency on the Destroyer, its 99th percentile write latency is about half the previous record. The 99th percentile read latency beats the previous record by more than 60%.
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Lolimaster - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link
The past is the past, few years ago, a 20GB HDD cost $200 so?btb - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link
Does the Optane 900P have support for hardware based Bitlocker encryption?Currently I have a motherboard with a TPM, and an SSD with Microsoft eDrive/TCG Opal/IEEE 1667 support, and thus support for hardware based(not software) Bitlocker.
Would the Optane work in a similar manner, if I use it as a boot drive?
voicequal - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link
Mixed reads & writes are a significant weak spot for SSD performance, where a sequential write workload can degrade a sequential read workload and vice versa. It looks like Optane has completely resolved this (no more bathtub curve). It would be interesting to see a mixed sequential test with QD > 1, so that both read & write requests are in the queue. In theory, throughput could be 2x under 50/50 mixed workloads if Optane is fast enough to saturate the full duplex paths, like the PCIe bus, in both directions.evilpaul666 - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link
I ordered a 480GB AIC version from the popular online vendor. I was surprised it was actually available. Seems to be bucking a trend this year.Hopefully, Intel ironed out the bugs and there won't be crashes until multiple firmware updates over the next year.
Anecdotally, I've heard good things about improved UX. I'll find out in a few days. It's replacing an Intel 750 400GB from about two years ago.
Mikewind Dale - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link
This is awesome. But what excites me most is using XPoint to replace RAM.I wonder, can we get an approximate simulation of what that world could be like, by making a system with a deliberately minuscule amount of RAM, installing a 32 GB Optane module, and setting the Windows page file to be on that Optane module? I'd be interested to see some benchmarks.
evilpaul666 - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link
There was a demo of a system with only 4GB RAM that was supposed to have had good results."Bullwinkle J Moose" - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link
Would System Start-up be any faster?---------------------------------------------------
Faster that what? Apples to Bannana's?
A 35 Watt Dualcore Sandy bridge will boot a fresh install of Windows 10 Fall Crapper Edition (Sept 2017) in 5.35 seconds to a Samsung 850 Pro
or, the same computer will boot a fresh install of Windows XP-SP2 in 3 - 4 seconds (it varies every boot)
Then, I've seen people bragging on youtube for booting new 90+ Watt Quadcore machines to Windows 10 on an M.2 drive in 17 seconds
So, wutz your opinion?
How fast is fast ?
cheshirster - Sunday, October 29, 2017 - link
Those prices are FAKE.CaedenV - Sunday, October 29, 2017 - link
Come on Intel! Storage isn't what this tech is made for! This was supposed to have faster throughput and act as a RAM replacement, not SSD replacement! Being able to replace RAM and storage with something that is slightly slower than RAM, but the capacity of a large SSD would have huge benefits. Imagine 'launching' a program and all that needs to be done is to flip a flag from inactive to active and your whole program is up and running. No loading from the HDD/SSD into RAM, just activate a section of memory and update the windows registry keys if needed. Having direct HDD/SSD access to the CPU without needing to load into RAM first. These would be huge advantages. But instead Intel saw that it wasnt going to be good enough for that so they released what they had as a way to cash in and make up for all of the wasted R&D on this tech over the years.Granted; it is not ALL bad. For consumers this would be like burning money. But for business use this is amazing tech. At my work we have a huge document management system with some ~6 million documents in it, and 200+ users running searches on them all the time. On HDD these searches would take just over a minute. We recently moved the search cache to SSDs which dropped the search time down to ~10-20 sec. With Optane we could lower it to near instant search times. Not going to do it any time soon, but there is absolutely a market for this kind of tech in the business IT world. I just don't understand why Intel is marketing it to gamers.
Reflex - Sunday, October 29, 2017 - link
To be fair, the software ecosystem is a decade or more behind the concept of unified memory. Even if this was a capable RAM replacement today, nothing could take advantage of it, and wouldn't be able to for a very long time.