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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lmcd - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
Funny, when SSDs came out we were promised they'd be orders of magnitude faster than mechanical HDDs. The first ones weren't.Drumsticks - Sunday, October 29, 2017 - link
I think my primary point of criticism with your view is that, despite Intel not reaching their goals, it is measurably better than the competition at a better price per GB per performance.It might not have hit the endurance targets they wanted, but for 2-3x the cost of your opponent, they've achieved some 20x endurance, on par in the worst case, and 6-8 times better in many measurably important scenarios.
On top of that, you tout the benefits of SLC and claim that SLC is undeniably faster than XPoint, because if SLC wasn't held back by the cheap and underpowered controllers of yesteryear, it could really fly. How do you know the same thing is not true of 3DXP? Perhaps better understanding of its use and a better controller, and maybe a second generation of the memory, will enable Intel to reach even higher performance and endurance heights. You can't claim that SLC is better, and is simply held back by 2014 era controllers, while not allowing that 3DXP could likely be held back by it's controller as well. We have no idea what the performance ceiling for 3DXP is, because we've seen all of one generation of products.
To extend your analogy, I might be disappointed if I only received $450, but if everybody else is still only making $200, I'm going to go home happy.
Rektide - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
This shows an Intel 900P with a total write endurance of 8.7PB, and a 850 Pro with a total write endurance of 150 TB. But a stress test of a 850 Pro in fact survived 9.1 PB[1]! Meanwhile, if you reach 8.7PB on the 900P, Intel will forcibly move your drive into read-only mode.If you look at Ark, Intel describes it's Endurance Rating to mean "Endurance rating indicates the expected data storage cycles to be expected over the life of the device." When they say that, they mean "and not a megabyte more". Whereas when Samsung says it, they, at least once, meant "but this drive may go 60x more than it's rating". I really severely dislike this twist of the knife, this drastic change Intel and Intel alone is perpetrating against it's consumers.
Does the P4800X also commit seppuku the megabyte it reaches it's Endurance Lifetime? I'm not sure if all Intel drives are so malicious, or is it consumer & enthusiast drives? How do I know which drives are programmed to self destruct on me, Intel?
[1] http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/endurance-test-of...
ddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
It is actually worse than locking in read-only mode - on the next boot cycle the drive gets bricked. So if you didn't manage to get that data in time, it is gone forever. Great feature.Spunjji - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link
I have seen this with Intel consumer SSDs. It's amazing - it doesn't even tell you that it's failing and that you have one (yes, one) chance to backup your data before it goes forever. Usually the drive just throws an error, so your average user reboots the system and bam, the drive's not even in the BIOS anymore.Their drive failure behaviour is criminal.
voicequal - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link
Agreed - bricking is a terrible failure mode for a consumer drive. For an enterprise drive, it *might* make sense, since its you want things to fail hard and fast so that backup systems can detect and take over.FwFred - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
Wow, need a block button to improve SnR.Meteor2 - Tuesday, October 31, 2017 - link
Indeed -- though I simply skip any comments written by ddriver. Never any value in them (but a remarkably effective troll).Lolimaster - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link
The 1000X was supposed to be on latency and endurance, not much more, and maybe 10X random 4K performance.CajunArson - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
I thought you were a reliable AMD koolaid drinker?It's funny how you insult these products that you have never used but would never in a million years hurl their $7000 Radeon SSG under the bus... you know, the one that uses a consumer-grade GPU slapped together with a RAID-0 array of cheap consumer-grade NVME drives to supposedly do rendering jobs faster than a regular GPU.