The Intel Optane SSD 800p (58GB & 118GB) Review: Almost The Right Size
by Billy Tallis on March 8, 2018 5:15 PM 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 Light test allows the flash-based SSDs to make the most of their write caching throughout the test, so even the 900p is surpassed by the Samsung NVMe SSDs while the 800p ranks with the budget NVMe drives. When the drives are full and the flash-based SSDs get bogged down with garbage collection, the 900p comes out ahead but the 800p still trails behind the Samsung 960 PRO. The VROC configuration look especially poor in terms of average data rate, and the RAID-5 performance is surprisingly low.
The Optane SSD 800p scores in the middle tier of SSDs for average latency on the Light test, and VROC RAID is no help here. VROC does help with the 99th percentile latencies, but without it the 800p looks like a low-end drive that merely doesn't have garbage collection problems.
The average read latencies from the 800p are almost twice as high as those from the 900p, and VROC's overhead only makes it worse. The average write latencies of the 900p aren't as good as the best flash-based SSDs, and the write latency of the 800p is well over twice that of the 900p.
The 99th percentile latency scores from the 800p are not great, but at least the drives perform just as well when full. Small flash-based drives are the most heavily affected when constant garbage collection becomes necessary.
The Light test is a fairly short run with any of these drives, but the 800p still manages to return extremely good power usage numbers that are well ahead of any flash-based NVMe SSD.
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name99 - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
Not QUITE true.Apple has done it (IMHO very successfully) in part because
- they understand something of the data patterns and
- already had tech in the file system to move hot data (hot file system data AND hot files) to the fastest part of the medium and
- they were willing to include ENOUGH flash (128GB) and fast flash; they didn't cheap out.
But yeah, the solutions sold by Seagate were not (in my experience) very impressive, especially considering the ridiculous premium Seagate charged for them.
What you CAN do on Apple systems (and I have done, very successfully, multiple times) is to fuse external SSDs with other drives (either other external or an internal HD) and this behaves just like a native fusion drive, you can even boot off it. This means you can retrofit fusion even to old macs (eg I have a 2007 iMac running a fusion system based on an SSD in an external FW-800 enclosure, fused with the internal 320GB drive).
zepi - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
Sounds like Apple Fusion drive. Very difficult to do well on drive-level, much easier to do well with some OS support and filesystem level.Afaik people have been relatively happy with their Fusion drives, though personally I find them horribly expensive. Then again, that applies to all Apple storage options, they always feel insanely expensive.
PeachNCream - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
Optane performance is good in some ways and disappointing in others. I'd like to see the technology improve since NAND endurance is a problem that warrants a solution. Maybe Optane isn't that solution.Reflex - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
Optane basically is a variation of Phase-Change Memory. It's been around a long time, but Micron/Intel have finally managed to make it in large enough capacities to productize it out of niche markets. There are other contenders for next gen memory &storage, ranging from MRAM (magnetic memory) to ReRAM to racetrack memory (HP has claimed to be on the edge of productizing that for about four years now).I am just happy one finally got out there, an it is in pretty good shape for a first gen product. Hoping this gets others to get serious about bringing alternative storage methods to market soon.
Lolimaster - Saturday, March 10, 2018 - link
At least the 860 EVO and Pro improved endurance a lot for consumer.600TB 860 EVO 1TB
1.2PB 860 Pro 1TB
leexgx - Sunday, March 11, 2018 - link
they can easy do 4x that especially the Pro drive (they was been Really conservative before, mainly so it did not affect the sales of there enterprise drives)heck the 840 Pro did was 2PB before it died suddenly (but it did all that with 0 read errors)
Araemo - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
Can we get the consistency scatter plots for this drive? Those are an awesome tool to gauge the real world 'feel' of the drive.Billy Tallis - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
They're an awesome tool to exaggerate the impact of garbage collection pauses on flash-based SSDs. Real-world usage doesn't involve constant writes to a full drive. Those random write consistency graphs often show interesting things about how drives handle GC, but they're a horrible way of ranking real-world performance of SSDs.Zinabas - Saturday, March 10, 2018 - link
As a thought the best case to use these in... would be an AMD Ryzen system with (Fuzedrive) the new software that manages all the drives as one volume. The small capacity would be automanaged by software and would be swapped to fit whatever you're playing at the time.emvonline - Monday, March 12, 2018 - link
so there doesnt seen to be a clear difference in real world applications. its faster with lower latency but does not always show up. could you cleary pick the optane drive vs samsung 960 in a blind test everytime running games and office apps?