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
eddman - Monday, March 12, 2018 - link
90? It is stated as 20nm in that table up there.Nottheface - Monday, March 12, 2018 - link
I was told these are not related in a previous article's posts: https://www.anandtech.com/comments/12136/the-intel...Ewitte12 - Monday, April 30, 2018 - link
They had difficulty keeping the enterprise drives in stock.The 2X quote was for RAM. low queue depth obliterates NAND. Most other speeds are on par with NAND (with sustained a bit behind) but this is direct access to the storage. Most NAND drives have sophisticated RAM caching it can be writing way after the bar disappears off your screen.
The biggest issue with pricing. Optane has high early adopter fees (which come with a few extra bugs usually). Also anything under the 900p is kinda pointless. 3.0x2 and low capacities??? Not worth it.
Gothmoth - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
intel hyped this like crazy and after reading the paper i was hyped too.but this seems like just another way for intel to push it´s stock market value with redicolous claims.
hescominsoon - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
Semiaccurate had 3d x-point pegged from the beginning:https://www.semiaccurate.com/?s=point
Ashinjuka - Saturday, March 10, 2018 - link
Optanic.DanNeely - Thursday, March 8, 2018 - link
Could we see results from Optane as cache + budget SSD and Optane as cache + high end SSD?I'm not sure it'd be worthwhile with a fast SSD since it only beats them in a subset of benches, but it looks capable of giving a decent boost to budget flash. Cost effectiveness vs just buying better flash'd be the harder question.
iter - Thursday, March 8, 2018 - link
Cache only makes sense for a HDD. It would make no difference combining it with an SSD. Not in terms of real world application performance anyway.Spending on 118 gb of optane is pointless when you can get a decent 512 gb ssd for the same money. Over 200% higher the capacity at 99% of the performance. It is a no brainer. Intel will have to resort to bribing OEMs once again if they are to score any design wins.
patrickjp93 - Saturday, March 10, 2018 - link
Uh, think again on big data where the indices for the databases you're running are way too big to fit in memory. AWS is just one cloud provider making extensive use of Optane, especially in DynamoDB, RDS, Memcached, and Lambda where multi-tenant container environments definitely benefit in rapid spinup thanks to the much lower latency 3DXP.Billy Tallis - Thursday, March 8, 2018 - link
All of our usual SSD tests are for the drive acting as a secondary drive, but Intel's Optane-specific cache software only supports the boot volume, so it's rather awkward to test.