AnandTech 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.

ATSB - The Destroyer (Data Rate)

The average data rates from the Intel Optane SSD 800p on The Destroyer are comparable to some of the faster flash-based SSDs we've tested, but the 800p isn't as fast as the Samsung 960 PRO. Intel's VROC clearly doesn't help performance on this kind of test, and instead it just adds overhead.

ATSB - The Destroyer (Average Latency)ATSB - The Destroyer (99th Percentile Latency)

The average and 99th percentile latency scores of the Optane SSD 800p on The Destroyer are good, but don't beat the best flash-based SSDs and are far higher than the Optane 900p. Intel VROC seems to improve latency some even though it was detrimental to the average data rate.

ATSB - The Destroyer (Average Read Latency)ATSB - The Destroyer (Average Write Latency)

The average read latency of the 800p is more than twice as high as that of the 900p, and is higher than the Samsung 960 PRO. VROC RAID-0 adds a few more microseconds of read latency. The average write latency of the 800p is far worse than the 900p or high-end flash based SSDs, but VROC greatly improves the write latencies and the four-drive RAID-0 is comparable to the Optane SSD 900p.

ATSB - The Destroyer (99th Percentile Read Latency)ATSB - The Destroyer (99th Percentile Write Latency)

Intel's VROC helps significantly with the 99th percentile read and write latencies, taking the 800p from not quite high-end to beating a single 900p.

ATSB - The Destroyer (Power)

The energy usage of the Optane SSD 800p over the course of The Destroyer is far lower than that of any flash-based SSD. The 800p completes the test fairly quickly, and unlike the 900p it keeps power consumption reasonably low throughout the test. The low-end flash based SSDs can take more than twice as long to complete the test while drawing more power than the 800p.

Introduction AnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy
Comments Locked

116 Comments

View All Comments

  • patrickjp93 - Saturday, March 10, 2018 - link

    Until you start running databases, multi-tenant VM environments, and large swap files for map-reduce, inference drawing, etc..
  • xenol - Monday, March 12, 2018 - link

    Yeah, let me know when the average consumer uses that.
  • keralataxi - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link

    thank you for sharing this.This site is really helpful to me and i think you have to collect more details about the topic.
    http://keralatravelcabs.com/tempo-traveller-taxi-s...
  • JohnBooty - Monday, March 26, 2018 - link

    Rrrrrrright. So, yes, a human wouldn't perceive... the latency improvement seen on a single IOP on Octane vs. an alternative.

    Bravo. That's about as insightful as pointing out that a human also wouldn't notice the difference in latency between a single operation on a 3ghz CPU vs. a 4ghz CPU. Because microseconds, amiirite?

    Just for your reference: this is 2018. Unless we're traveling back to 1985 and benchmarking the floppy drive on a Commodore 64, we usually measure the performance or modern by looking at the aggregate performance of thousands or even millions of operations.
  • Ewitte12 - Monday, April 30, 2018 - link

    When something is loading it is rarely doing 1 task. Hundreds or thousands of tasks will definitely be noticeable. You would be surprised how much goes on just loading an app...
  • MrSpadge - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link

    No, I can't remember anyone saying that. It was supposed to be an intermediate step between high NAND and DRAM.
  • ATC9001 - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link

    It very well may cost less than NAND, but no business in the world is going to sell a product that's faster for less than another one of it's products (unless it simple doesn't sell, which is surely not that case for NAND).

    I'm pretty excited overall...sure it's hyped up a lot, but remember the first SSDs? Took a while to figure out the controllers and such.

    It's great to see the low latency...with DRAM prices the way they are *MAYBE* some enterprise customers will look to optane.

    As a gamer, I'm more concerned with sequential performance and higher capacities, but for prosumers with high random workloads this might make sense.
  • sharath.naik - Sunday, March 11, 2018 - link

    More importantly wan't xpoint supposed to have endurance many times over an SLC nand?. The spec here is not much better than an MLC let alone SLC
  • chrnochime - Thursday, March 8, 2018 - link

    And FWIW, I value endurance(write cycle) far more than speed. So if it's as fast as SLC I'm okay with that.
  • iter - Thursday, March 8, 2018 - link

    Performance means the actual media performance, that includes P/E latency and endurance. slc has great endurance, that I myself would be more than willing to pay for, alas there is no such an option as no slc products have been made the last few years.

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now