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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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
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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 SLCchrnochime - 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.