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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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.