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 - Light
Our Light storage test has relatively more sequential accesses and lower queue depths than The Destroyer or the Heavy test, and it's by far the shortest test overall. It's based largely on applications that aren't highly dependent on storage performance, so this is a test more of application launch times and file load times. This test can be seen as the sum of all the little delays in daily usage, but with the idle times trimmed to 25ms it takes less than half an hour to run. Details of the Light test can be found here. As with the ATSB Heavy test, this test is run with the drive both freshly erased and empty, and after filling the drive with sequential writes.
The Light test allows the flash-based SSDs to make the most of their write caching throughout the test, so even the 900p is surpassed by the Samsung NVMe SSDs while the 800p ranks with the budget NVMe drives. When the drives are full and the flash-based SSDs get bogged down with garbage collection, the 900p comes out ahead but the 800p still trails behind the Samsung 960 PRO. The VROC configuration look especially poor in terms of average data rate, and the RAID-5 performance is surprisingly low.
The Optane SSD 800p scores in the middle tier of SSDs for average latency on the Light test, and VROC RAID is no help here. VROC does help with the 99th percentile latencies, but without it the 800p looks like a low-end drive that merely doesn't have garbage collection problems.
The average read latencies from the 800p are almost twice as high as those from the 900p, and VROC's overhead only makes it worse. The average write latencies of the 900p aren't as good as the best flash-based SSDs, and the write latency of the 800p is well over twice that of the 900p.
The 99th percentile latency scores from the 800p are not great, but at least the drives perform just as well when full. Small flash-based drives are the most heavily affected when constant garbage collection becomes necessary.
The Light test is a fairly short run with any of these drives, but the 800p still manages to return extremely good power usage numbers that are well ahead of any flash-based NVMe SSD.
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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.