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.
205 Comments
View All Comments
melgross - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
You’re not as objective as you proclaim. If you were, you’d be more in line with what the conslucion says, which is that for many things there isn’t much of an advantage, but for others there is, and most of the reas\OSs aren’t the fault of this, but rather, old concepts in storage.ddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
So in order to be objective, I will have to echo what AT - a heavily pro-intel biassed website says about it? Yep, that sounds legit :)It would seem you confuse objectivity for conformity.
r0gue6 - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
I can tell you are extremely bias simply because you use ignorant words like "hypetane" unironically.ddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
Hypetane is perfectly suited. The product turned out to be 90% hype, and it also rhymes. What more could anyone possibly want?And calling things for what they are is the very essence of objectivity.
shabby - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
It is 1000 times faster... at die level, pcie and drivers show it down. /intel pr proddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
Sure, if you say so. I mean it is obviously saturating and exceeding the PCIE bandwidth and crippled by the PCIE latency.Oh wait, it isn't. Maybe it is intel's controller then. Who knows. I mean aside from you ;)
lmcd - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
Ironic, because you aren't the king of anything.voicequal - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link
It's pretty clear Intel's performance claims were speaking of the cell level (NAND vs 3D Xpoint), not the system level (SSD, SYSmark, etc).Drumsticks - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
Not that anybody will ever convince you that anything Intel can do is good, but here is a graph of how much endurance the 480GB Optane SSD has in terms of TBW compared to the other Pro SSDs.https://www.pcper.com/files/imagecache/article_max...
ddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
Cool, even if not real-world maxing out but intel's claim, I am willing to assume that intel won't lie on the spec sheet of an actual product.But then again, I am going to refer you to this little gem:
http://images.hardwarecanucks.com/image/akg/Storag...
The rated number is still almost 50 times less than what intel claimed officially. 45 times less is pretty significant IMO. Imagine getting a job where they promise you 20k $ a month, and end up paying you 450$ instead. Not cool. In light of that, I wouldn't say my criticism is ungrounded.
For me personally, 20 times better endurance than NAND is pretty good, good enough to justify the purchase even at the present price.
Now if only intel started out with a 20x claim instead of the 1000x claim, I wouldn't have any legit reason to bash that product. And maybe if more call intel on their BS, they just might cut it. And I don't think that will be a bad thing.