The Intel Optane SSD 800p (58GB & 118GB) Review: Almost The Right Size
by Billy Tallis on March 8, 2018 5:15 PM ESTConclusion
The Optane SSD 800p is the closest that Intel has come to offering a 3D XPoint-based product for the mainstream consumer market. Unlike the Optane Memory M.2, the 800p is available in capacities that allow it to be used as ordinary storage. Unlike the premium Optane SSD 900p, the 800p uses a form factor that is broadly supported by both desktops and notebooks, and the power consumption doesn't rule out use on battery power.
We had trouble getting the idle power management on the 800p to work with our testbed, but there's no question that the 800p is one of the most efficient SSDs under load. Its high performance at low queue depths allows the 800p to complete real-world tests as quickly as the fastest flash-based SSDs, but the power consumption of the 800p doesn't climb as high.
The Optane SSD 800p uses a PCIe 3 x2 interface, which is becoming increasingly common this year as more low-end NVMe SSDs show up. The Optane SSD 800p definitely doesn't belong in that category, but the two-lane link does cap throughput relative to the high-end NVMe SSDs that use a four-lane link. Fortunately, this bottleneck doesn't matter much to the 800p. The key strength of Optane products is their low latency, allowing high performance at low queue depths where total throughput usually doesn't come close to saturating a fast PCIe link. The PCIe x2 link used by the 800p does nothing to diminish its latency advantage.
| NVMe SSD Price Comparison | |||||
| 58GB | 118-128GB | 240-280GB | 480-512GB | ||
| Intel Optane SSD 800p | $129.00 (222¢/GB) | $199.00 (169¢/GB) | |||
| Intel Optane SSD 900p | $379.00 (135¢/GB) | $599.00 (125¢/GB) | |||
| Intel SSD 760p | $69.99 (55¢/GB) | $99.99 (39¢/GB) | $272.43 (53¢/GB) | ||
| Samsung 960 PRO | $299.99 (59¢/GB) | ||||
| Samsung 960 EVO | $119.99 (48¢/GB) | $229.99 (46¢/GB) | |||
| Plextor M9Pe | $127.38 (50¢/GB) | $215.59 (42¢/GB) | |||
| WD Black | $99.99 (39¢/GB) | $192.95 (38¢/GB) | |||
| MyDigitalSSD SBX | $59.99 (47¢/GB) | $94.99 (37¢/GB) | $159.99 (31¢/GB) | ||
The pricing on the Optane SSD 800p is a disappointment, but not entirely surprising. Small SSDs tend to have a higher price per GB than larger models. The 800p is more expensive on a per GB basis than the premium Optane SSD 900p, even though the latter uses a much larger and more expensive controller. So while the technical merits of the 800p may make it look like something approaching a mass-market product, it is actually the most expensive consumer SSD on the market.
If Intel could get the price down to the range of high-end MLC flash based drives like the Samsung 960 PRO, the 800p might be compelling for some users who are sure they don't need high capacities or who already have other SSDs to use as secondary storage with an Optane boot drive. Enthusiasts who don't want to jump all the way to the 900p or who only have M.2 slots to spare can get most of the performance benefits from the lesser Optane drive, and high-performance flash-based NVMe drives aren't available in low capacities.
For most users, the 800p still doesn't make sense to use as the only drive in a system. The 58GB model pretty much requires you to have another drive in your system, either another SSD or a hard drive being cached by the 800p (in which case, why not get the cheaper Optane Memory?). The 118GB model can more easily serve as the sole drive in a system; my personal laptop only has 128GB, and it serves most of my needs except for photo organizing and editing (for that, I have a NAS). But when a decent entry-level NVMe SSD can provide four times the capacity for about the same price, it is hard to choose the smaller drive.
With today's prices, I would almost always choose a ~500GB 3D TLC SSD over the 118GB Optane SSD 800p. At 500GB and up, even the latest SSDs with 512Gb 3D TLC NAND don't really suffer the performance penalties of being too small, so the Optane SSD 800p's performance isn't a huge boost. It's always less of a hassle when your primary drive is big enough to hold most or all of your data, and drives like the Samsung 960 EVO or Intel SSD 760p (limited availability at the moment) are fast enough.
We performed some tests of the Optane SSD 800p in RAID using Intel's Virtual RAID on CPU feature, available on their latest enthusiast and server platforms but not the mainstream desktop platform. VROC clearly adds some software overhead that subtracts from the latency advantage that is the strongest selling point for Optane SSDs. At high queue depths such as those generated by synthetic benchmarks or enterprise workloads, that overhead may be overcome by the performance advantages of a four-drive RAID-0. But for more typical interactive desktop workloads, VROC does not provide a net improvement in storage performance when used with the Optane SSD 800p. There are some peripheral benefits to performance consistency compared to a single 800p SSD, but they are unimportant. For users seeking Optane-class performance with higher capacity than the 800p, the Optane SSD 900p will be more cost effective and offer better performance.
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MrSpadge - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
Did you ever had an SSD run out of write cycles? I've personally only witnessed one such case (old 60 GB drive from 2010, old controller, being almost full all the time), but numerous other SSD deaths (controller, Sandforce or whatever).name99 - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
I have an SSD that SMART claims is at 42%. I'm curious to see how this plays out over the next three years or so.But yeah, I'd agree with your point. I've had two SSDs so far fail (many fewer than HDs, but of course I've owned many more HDs and for longer) and both those failures were inexplicable randomness (controller? RAM?) but they certainly didn't reflect the SSD running out of write cycles.
I do have some very old (heavily used) devices that are flash based (iPod nano 3rd gen) and they are "failing" in the expected SSD fashion --- getting slower and slower, and can be goosed with some speed for another year by giving them a bulk erase. Meaning that it does seem that SSDs "wear-out" failure (when everything else is reliable) happens as claimed --- the device gets so slow that at some some point you're better off just moving to a new one --- but it takes YEARS to get there, and you get plenty of warning, not unexpected medium failure.
MonkeyPaw - Monday, March 12, 2018 - link
The original Nexus 7 had this problem, I believe. Those things aged very poorly.80-wattHamster - Monday, March 12, 2018 - link
Was that the issue? I'd read/heard that Lollipop introduced a change to the cache system that didn't play nicely with Tegra chips.sharath.naik - Sunday, March 11, 2018 - link
the Endurance listed here is barely better than MLC. it is not where close to even SLCReflex - Thursday, March 8, 2018 - link
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/01/xpoint_ex...I know ddriver can't resist continuing to use 'hypetane' but seriously looking at this article, Optane appears to be a win nearly across the board. In some cases quite significantly. And this is with a product that is constrained in a number of ways. Prices also are starting at a much better place than early SSD's did vs HDD's.
Really fantastic early results.
iter - Thursday, March 8, 2018 - link
You need to lay off whatever you are abusing.Fantastic results? None of the people who can actually benefit from its few strong points are rushing to buy. And for everyone else intel is desperately flogging it at it is a pointless waste of money.
Due to its failure to deliver on expectations and promisses, it is doubtful intel will any time soon allocate the manufacturing capacity it would require to make it competitive to nand, especially given its awful density. At this time intel is merely trying to make up for the money they put into making it. Nobody denies the strong low queue depth reads, but that ain't enough to make it into a money maker. Especially not when a more performant alternative has been available since before intel announced xpoint.
Alexvrb - Thursday, March 8, 2018 - link
Most people ignore or gloss over the strong low QD results, actually. Which is ironic given that most of the people crapping all over them for having the "same" performance (read: bars in extreme benchmarks) would likely benefit from improved performance at low QD.With that being said capacity and price are terrible. They'll never make any significant inroads against NAND until they can quadruple their current best capacity.
Reflex - Thursday, March 8, 2018 - link
Alex - I'm sure they are aware of that. I just remember how consumer NAND drives launched, the price/perf was far worse than this compared to HDD's, and those drives still lost in some types of performance (random read/write for instance) despite the high prices. For a new tech, being less than 3x while providing across the board better characteristics is pretty promising.Calin - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
SSD never had a random R/W problem compared to magnetic disks, not even if you compared them by price to RAIDs and/or SCSI server drives. What problem they might had at the beginning was in sequential read (and especially write) speed. Current sequential write speeds for hard drives are limited by the rpm of the drive, and they reach around 150MB/s for a 7200 rpm 1TB desktop drive. Meanwhile, the Samsung 480 EVO SSD at 120GB (a good second or third generation SSD) reaches some 170MB/s sequential write.Where the magnetic rotational disk drives suffer a 100 times reduction in performance is random write, while the SSD hardly care. This is due to the awful access time of hard drives (move the heads and wait for the rotation of the disks to bring the data below the read/write heads) - that's 5-10 milliseconds wait time for each new operation).