The Intel Optane SSD 800p (58GB & 118GB) Review: Almost The Right Size
by Billy Tallis on March 8, 2018 5:15 PM ESTRandom Read Performance
Our first test of random read performance uses very short bursts of operations issued one at a time with no queuing. The drives are given enough idle time between bursts to yield an overall duty cycle of 20%, so thermal throttling is impossible. Each burst consists of a total of 32MB of 4kB random reads, from a 16GB span of the disk. The total data read is 1GB.
Like the Optane Memory M.2, the Optane SSD 800p has extremely high random read performance even at QD1. The M.2 drives even have a substantial lead over the much larger and more power-hungry 900p and its enterprise counterpart P4800X. Even the best flash-based SSDs are almost an order of magnitude slower.
Our sustained random read performance is similar to the random read test from our 2015 test suite: queue depths from 1 to 32 are tested, and the average performance and power efficiency across QD1, QD2 and QD4 are reported as the primary scores. Each queue depth is tested for one minute or 32GB of data transferred, whichever is shorter. After each queue depth is tested, the drive is given up to one minute to cool off so that the higher queue depths are unlikely to be affected by accumulated heat build-up. The individual read operations are again 4kB, and cover a 64GB span of the drive.
The Optane SSDs continue to dominate on the longer random read test, though the addition of higher queue depths allows the 900p to pull ahead of the 800p.
With extremely high performance but lacking the high power draw of the enterprise-class 900p, the Optane SSD 800p is by far the most power efficient at performing random reads.
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The Optane SSD 800p starts out in the lead at QD1, but its performance is overtaken by the 900p at all higher queue depths. The flash-based SSDs have power consumption that is comparable to the 800p, but even at QD32 Samsung's 960 PRO hasn't caught up to the 800p's random read performance.
Random Write Performance
Our test of random write burst performance is structured similarly to the random read burst test, but each burst is only 4MB and the total test length is 128MB. The 4kB random write operations are distributed over a 16GB span of the drive, and the operations are issued one at a time with no queuing.
Flash-based SSDs can cache and combine write operations, so they are able to offer random write performance close to that of the Optane SSDs, which do not perform any significant caching. Where the 32GB Optane Memory offered relatively poor burst random write performance, the 800p is at least as fast as the best flash-based SSDs.
As with the sustained random read test, our sustained 4kB random write test runs for up to one minute or 32GB per queue depth, covering a 64GB span of the drive and giving the drive up to 1 minute of idle time between queue depths to allow for write caches to be flushed and for the drive to cool down.
When higher queue depths come into play, the write caching ability of Samsung's high-end NVMe SSDs allows them to exceed the Optane SSD 800p's random write speed, though the 900p still holds on to the lead. The 800p's improvement over the Optane Memory is even more apparent with this longer test.
The power efficiency of the 800p during random writes is pretty good, though Samsung's top drives are better still. The Optane Memory lags behind on account of its poor performance, and the 900p ranks below that because it draws so much power in the process of delivering top performance.
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The Samsung 960 PRO and the Intel Optane SSD 900p show off at high queue depths thanks to the high channel counts of their controllers. The Optane SSD 800p doesn't have much room for performance to scale beyond QD2.
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Reflex - Saturday, March 10, 2018 - link
I also think people forget how crappy & expensive gen1 and 2 SSD's were.Drazick - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
We really need those in U2 / SATA Express form.Desktop users shouldn't use M2 with all its thermal limitations.
jabber - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
Whichever connector you use or whatever the thermals, once you go above 600MBps the real world performance difference is very hard to tell in most cases. We just need SATA4 and we can dump all these U2/SATA Express sockets. M.2 for compactness and SATA4 for everything else non Enterprise. Done.Reflex - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
U2 essentially is next gen SATA. There is no SATA4 on the way. SATA is at this point an 18 year old specification ripe for retirement. There is also nothing wrong with M.2 even in desktops. Heat spreaders aren't a big deal in that scenario. All that's inside a SATA drive is the same board you'd see in M.2 form factor more or less.leexgx - Saturday, March 10, 2018 - link
apart from that your limited to 0-2 slots per board (most come with 6 SATA ports)i agree that a newer SATA that support NVME over it be nice but U2 be nice if anyone would adopt it and make the ports become standard and have U2 SSDs
jabber - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
I am amazed that no one has decided to just do the logical thing and slap a 64GB Flash cache in a 4TB+ HDD and be done with it. One unit and done.iter - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
They have, seagate has a hybrid drive, not all that great really.The reason is that caching algorithms suck. They are usually FIFO - first in first out, and don't take into account actual usage patterns. Meaning you get good performance only if your work is confined to a data set that doesn't exceed the cache. If you exceed it, it starts bringing in garbage, wearing down the flash over nothing. Go watch a movie, that you are only gonna watch once - it will cache that, because you accessed it. And now you have gigabytes of pointless writes to the cache, displacing data that actually made sense to be cached.
Which is why I personally prefer to have separate drives rather than cache. Because I know what can benefit from flash and what makes no sense there. Automatic tiering is pathetic, even in crazy expensive enterprise software.
jabber - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
Yeah I was using SSHD drives when they first came out but 8GB of flash doesn't really cut it. I'm sure after all this time 64GB costs the same as 8GB did back then (plus it would be space enough for several apps and data sets to be retained) and the algorithms will have improved. If Intel thinks caches for HDDs have legs then why not just combine them in one simple package?wumpus - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
Presumably, there's no market. People who buy spinning rust are either buying capacity (for media, and using SSD for the rest) or cheaping out and not buying SSDs.What surprises me is that drives still include 64MB of DRAM, you would think that companies who bothered to make these drives would have switched to TLC (and pseudo-SLC) for their buffer/caches (writing on power off must be a pain). Good luck finding someone who would pay for the difference.
Intel managed to shove this tech into the chipsets (presumably a software driver that looked for the hardware flag, similar to RAID) in 2011-2012, but apparently dropped that soon afterward. Too bad, reserving 64GB of flash to cache a harddrive (no idea if you could do this with a RAID array) sounds like something that is still usefull (not that you need the performance, just that the flash is so cheap). Just make sure the cache is set to "write through" [if this kills performance it shouldn't be on rust] to avoid doubling your chances of drive loss. Apparently the support costs weren't worth the bother.
leexgx - Saturday, March 10, 2018 - link
8GB should be plenty for SSHD and there currant generation have cache evic protection (witch i think is 3rd gen) so say a LBA block is read 10 times it will assume that is something you open often or its a system file or a startup item, so 2-3GB of data will not get removed easily (so windows, office, browsers and other startup items will always be in the nand cache) the rest of the caching is dynamic if its had more then 2-4 reads it caches it to the nandthe current generation SSHDs by seagate (don't know how others do it) its split into 3 sections so has a easy, bit harder and very hard to evict from read cache, as the first gen SSHDs from seagate just defragmenting the drive would end evicting your normal used stuff as any 2 reads would be cached right away that does not happen any more
if you expect it to make your games load faster you need to look elsewhere, as they are meant to boost commonly used applications and OS and on startup programs but still have the space for storage
that said i really dislike HDDs as boot drives if they did not cost £55 for a 250gb SSD i put them in for free