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%.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
205 Comments
View All Comments
investlite - Monday, November 6, 2017 - link
I bet you're still pissed we don't have flying cars. OMG, do you go to every new car unveiling and talk about how crappy each new car is because we were supposed to have flying cars by now?Gothmoth - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
when you do huge particle simulations you will want the fastest SSD you can get.ddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
I've been doing that, for VFX as well as multiphysics simulations for over a decade. It has always been an in-memory thing. It doesn't seem they simulated it, it seems they read baked simulation data, and stored in some insanely inefficient manner at that.As I implied, this has got to be a new record in rigged benchmarks. Shame!
extide - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
Sigh, the Optane drive didn't improve the performance of reading the data into the simulation. The simulation required (significantly?) more RAM than the system had. They put a big swap file on either a 960 PRO or on the Optane drive. It probably doesn't even matter where the simulation data was stored.ddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
Well, they should have bought moar ram then. Then maybe they could have kept that CPU busy at 100% and get much better time.I mean it is not like hypetane offers terabytes of capacity. Topping at 480 GB - that's entirely doable in RAM. More expressive - sure, but nonetheless a perfectly sensible investment if you are doing such simulations. It will pay for itself, as RAM is tremendously faster, and also doesn't wear, at least nowhere nearly as much as xpoint does.
extide - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
For that particular case, sure, maybe more ram is the way to go, but there are plenty of cases where the drive is better, like several of the ones I mentioned above. Most of those rely on the non-volatile aspect, which obviously RAM doesn't have.ddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
As I said - it has its advantages and uses. I also said I might even buy it.And the only reason I call it hypetane is because intel shamelessly lied about it, and continues to cheat in order to make it look good even after it became evident that it is not anywhere nearly as good as they initially claimed, and call me old-fashioned, but I have a problem with that.
It boggles the mind that people around here have such a problem with me just because I don't have my tongue up intel's rectum...
ddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
BTW, 1.1 billion particles, presuming the simulation is ran in FP64 mode, with x y and z coordinates for each particle would only require about 24 gigs of ram.Which raises the question, did they allocate each of those points on the heap or something?
ddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link
Opsie, silly me, it would take another 24gb for the vector of force for each particle. Now it is a little more plausible that 64gb might not be enough.CaedenV - Sunday, October 29, 2017 - link
Sure, in a perfect world you buy more RAM. But if you are in a situation where you don't have infinate cash and you can buy more RAM at $7/GB or an Optane SSD for ~$1-2/GB then Optane begins to look a bit more appealing. A 480GB drive running as cache for $600 vs 480GB of DDR4 at $3350.... that would make almost anyone thing twice.Or in the case of my work, we have a bunch of clustered servers, and we are maxxed out on ram but not yet ready to do a server upgrade (hoping to get 2 more years out of them), but we need more fast cache for a bunch of different applicaitons. The idea of running those caches on this kind of SSD sounds a lot more appealing than running on traditional SSDs.
But yes, when we upgrade servers, we will simply have more RAM on board. That is the obvious solution. But when a motherboard can only hold 256GB of RAM and you need more... life is often about compromises, and Optane tech sounds like a good compromise. But what you would use this for in daily life or in a normal computer? Man, that totally beats me! This product is almost too cheap for what it is good for (business class SSDs typically cost more than $1.25/GB still and are far slower than consumer SSDs), and completely useless and overpriced for that they are advertising it for.