The Intel Optane SSD 900P 280GB Review

AnandTech 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.