The Intel Optane SSD 800p (58GB & 118GB) Review: Almost The Right Size
by Billy Tallis on March 8, 2018 5:15 PM ESTPower Management
Real-world client storage workloads leave SSDs idle most of the time, so the active power measurements presented earlier in this review only account for a small part of what determines a drive's suitability for battery-powered use. Especially under light use, the power efficiency of a SSD is determined mostly be how well it can save power when idle.
SATA SSDs are tested with SATA link power management disabled to measure their active idle power draw, and with it enabled for the deeper idle power consumption score and the idle wake-up latency test. Our testbed, like any ordinary desktop system, cannot trigger the deepest DevSleep idle state.
Idle power management for NVMe SSDs is far more complicated than for SATA SSDs. NVMe SSDs can support several different idle power states, and through the Autonomous Power State Transition (APST) feature the operating system can set a drive's policy for when to drop down to a lower power state. There is typically a tradeoff in that lower-power states take longer to enter and wake up from, so the choice about what power states to use may differ for desktop and notebooks.
We report two idle power measurements. Active idle is representative of a typical desktop, where none of the advanced PCIe link or NVMe power saving features are enabled and the drive is immediately ready to process new commands. The idle power consumption metric is measured with PCIe Active State Power Management L1.2 state enabled and NVMe APST enabled.
The Optane SSD 800p has a bit of an unusual suite of power management capabilities. Previous Optane products have not implemented any low-power sleep states, giving them quite high idle power consumption but entirely avoiding the problem of latency waking up from a sleep state. The 800p implements a single low-power sleep state, while most NVMe SSDs that have multiple power states have at least two or three idle states with progressively lower power consumption in exchange for higher latency to enter or leave the sleep state. On the other hand, the 800p has three tiers of active power levels, so devices with strict power or thermal limits can constrain the 800p when properly configured.
Unfortunately, our usual idle power testing method didn't work with the 800p, leading it to show only a modest reduction in power rather than a reduction of multiple orders of magnitude. This may be related to the fact that the Optane SSD 800p indicates that it may take over a full second to enter its idle state. This is an unusually high entry latency, and something in our system configuration is likely preventing the 800p from fully transitioning to idle. We will continue to investigate this issue. However, based on the specifications alone, it looks like the 800p could benefit from an intermediate idle state that can be accessed more quickly.
(I should mention here that the last Intel consumer SSD we reviewed, the 760p, also initially showed poor power management on our test. We were eventually able to track this down to an artifact of our test procedure, and determined that the 760p's power management was unlikely to malfunction during real-world usage. The 760p now ranks as the NVMe SSD with the lowest idle power we've measured.)
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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?