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 - 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
116 Comments
View All Comments
Alexvrb - Saturday, March 10, 2018 - link
Calin you are obviously too young to remember some of the early "affordable" consumer NAND SSDs. Hammer them a bit and they stalled... producing worse results than a lot of fast HDDs... especially in random writes. Sequential speeds were never a major issue that I can recall.The_Assimilator - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
Trying to equate a NAND-to-Optane transition to the mechanical-HDD-to-SSD transition is laughable.wumpus - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
The moment pseudo-SLC in TLC showed up, Optane was pretty much dead in the SSD market. They would presumably compete with SLC (does anybody still make it?), but TLC is the coffin nail in consumer markets.From the moment the 3d-xpoint hypetrane started, it was clear that it would try to wedge itself into the memory hierarchy, presumably between flash and DRAM, and hopes for replacing flash.
Flash isn't going anywhere, and 3d-xpoint hasn't shown the endurance needed for a fast-paging DRAM replacement. It certainly wouldn't replace *all* DRAM, but anyone who's seen a 4GB machine actually function (slow, but they do work) knows that nearly all that expensive (hopefully DDR4 will fall back to Earth) DRAM could be replaced by something sufficiently fast, but neither flash nor 3d-xpoint is quite there.
To compound the problems, Intel decided that "Optane in a DDR4 slot" would be strictly proprietary. So there are marketing/political problems trying to get manufacturers to support it as well as technical issues to make the stuff.
name99 - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
Consumer NAND launched in an environment where it had SOME spaces where it was optimal, and so had the chance to grow. It started in phones and DAPs, then grew to ultra-laptops, and finally the desktop. Point is --- there were niches that could pay for on-going improvement.Octane is different because there is NO obvious niche that justifies continuing to pump money into it. The niche that was SUPPOSED to justify it (NV-DIMMs) is STILL MIA years after it was promised...
iwod - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
I am all for super fast QD1 results. But so far none of the application seems to benefits from it. At least not according to test results. I am wonder, we are either testing it wrong, looking at the wrong thing, or the benefits of QD1 is over thought and bottleneck is somewhere else.And NAND continues to get bigger better and faster. We may be looking at below $100 250GB SSD this year.
iter - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
Exactly. It is hilarious how them fanboys keep claiming that we overlook the advantages, when I explicitly state them almost every time.There are very little and far in between workloads where those advantages can translate into tangible improvement of real world performance.
When your bottleneck is a human being interacting via input devices, discrete savings of several dozens of microseconds are simply not perceivable.
Even cumulative savings are in fact not, because most of the time that data has to also be processed by the cpu, which is why synthetics aside, raw real world applications snow minuscule going from a decent ssd to a crazy fast nvme device.
sor - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
Probably has something to do with your name calling and “it keeps getting worse and worse” when that objectively isn’t true. You come off as having an axe to grind.It is not true that this is worse and worse. The power improvements shown here are quite impressive. Low QD performance is still better than NAND by an order of magnitude, and looks to have gotten a roughly 20% improvement. Sequential read now even beats NAND.
You and others are falling over yourselves to crap on it for some strange reason, and clearly are ignoring the upsides. It’s just a product.
iter - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
"when that objectively isn’t true"It absolutely is. It is slower than the 900p. They improved power a bit - big whoop, especially considering it came at the cost of gutting the interface by 50%.
118 GB? I bet enthusiasts all over the planet are drooling about that crazy capacity. Not to mention the smaller model...
Nobody denies the strong points, it is just that they are way too little to make this a good product.
Instead of getting bigger and faster it gets smaller and slower.
And somehow the price per GB increases.
Truly impressive.
nevcairiel - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
If you want to go down that road, at current consumer SSD speeds (say Samsung 960 Pro), I doubt any normal user would even notice if the performance suddenly doubled (or halfed, for that matter).Does that mean we should not innovate? Perhaps consumer work-load isn't the main goal, but if you have the hardware, why not try to make a consumer product, anyway.
MrSpadge - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
With decently fast SATA SSDs the bottleneck is almsot entirely the CPU already, unless you've got purely I/O load.