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.
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0ldman79 - Thursday, March 8, 2018 - link
That is a pretty significant limitation.With SSD's a lot of us have small to mid sized SSD as a boot drive and practically everything else resides on a spinner.
If Optane can't cache the secondary drive then it is of less use to me than even the Kaby Lake and above limitation. That means that even if I built a Kaby Lake or Coffee Lake I still won't get any benefit on the anything aside from the OS. My games are all installed on a mechanical drive.
Lolimaster - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
Crucial MX500 2TB $499If you're an avid GTAV player, the 118GB should be a nice thing for the game intall, also your pagefile and install/profile/cache of firefox/chrome.
TheWereCat - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
Micron 1100 2TB $370https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/s/ref=is_s_ss_i_1_9?k...
Reflex - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
Yup, grabbed one of those a few weeks ago, its a great drive for that price.hescominsoon - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
I run only a micro 1TB ssd in my machine for everything. I have a couple of friends who are into video editing and they use a spinning disk for temporary storage...but that's about it..:)name99 - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
Any decent SSD that wants to boost itself with a cache can ALREADY do so by using some of the MLC or TLC flash as SLC. And thereby run faster than Optane. And without requiring a separate controller and a separate Optane die.Optane is not buying you anything in the sort of market you describe.
Gunbuster - Thursday, March 8, 2018 - link
Capacity is still useless for any power user who would be shopping this.iter - Thursday, March 8, 2018 - link
It will be useful for pagefile spillover in case you have workloads that require more than the 32 or 64 gb of ram that most high end desktops come with.It will still massacre performance if you go paging, but it will be significantly better than nand, god forbid hdd.
jospoortvliet - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
That's an interesting use case, the first I read that seems reasonably useful... But it would still need more performance to really make it worth it, and even then only when you don't care about costs at all and your platform simply doesn't support more ram. I mean, as long as the system can handle another ram dimm, you'd go for that even with the insane prices atm...iter - Saturday, March 10, 2018 - link
The thing is many systems can't. 64 is currently a limit for high end, 128 for HEDT.It could get better by raiding more drives, but .... that's not an option on high end platforms due to the low PCIe lane count. You will have to give up on running a GPU if you want to snap in 4 of those drives.