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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Gastec - Saturday, March 10, 2018 - link
As a computer enthusiast I find that "Recommended Storage Configuration" pyramid from Intel highly insulting. $6000? And Wikipedia plays along with lines like "An enthusiast PC implies the early adoption of new hardware, which is sold at a premium price". Premium price! So an enthusiast nowadays is synonymous with wealth and willingness to fork out any amount of money to the Multinational Corporations!KDMann - Tuesday, April 6, 2021 - link
Mr. Tallis,An otherwise good article was ruined when I read this nonsense you wrote:
"...avoid the consequences of Microsoft's stupid NVMe driver write cache policy defaults, which severely curtail the write performance of consumer NVMe drives that have volatile write caches."
Unlike ANSI T10 and T11 SATA and SAS (and SCSI before it), NVMe is not a 'real' standard -- meaning it is not defined by any non-commercial standards body such as ANSI. This means that there is no guarantee that any given vendor of an NVMe SSD will be selling a product that responds correctly to write-cache inquiries. NVMe is an industry trade association that has no means of enforcing or sanctioning any vendor that does not follow this "non-standard standard".
Bashing Microsoft for this is stupid.