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 - Heavy
Our Heavy storage benchmark is proportionally more write-heavy than The Destroyer, but much shorter overall. The total writes in the Heavy test aren't enough to fill the drive, so performance never drops down to steady state. This test is far more representative of a power user's day to day usage, and is heavily influenced by the drive's peak performance. The Heavy workload test details can be found here. This test is run twice, once on a freshly erased drive and once after filling the drive with sequential writes.
As with The Destroyer, the average data rate of the Intel Optane SSD 800p puts it near the top of the rankings, but behind the fastest flash-based SSDs and the Optane 900p. Intel's VROC again adds overhead that isn't worthwhile without the high queue depths of synthetic benchmarks.
The average and 99th percentile latencies of the Optane SSD 800p on the Heavy test are better than any of the low-end NVMe SSDs, but it is only in RAID that the latency drops down to the level of the best flash-based SSDs and the 900p.
The average read latency of the Optane SSD 800p ranks second behind the 900p. VROC adds enough overhead that the RAID configurations end up having slightly higher average read latencies than the Samsung 960 PRO. For the average write latencies, VROC is far more useful, and helps the 800p make up for the lack of a write cache.
The 99th percentile read and write latencies of the 800p RAID configurations are on par with the 900p, but the individual drives have slightly worse QoS than the Samsung 960 PRO.
The 800p again leads in energy usage thanks to its high overall performance without the high baseline power consumption of the 900p. The budget NVMe SSDs all use at least twice as much energy over the course of the test, and the Samsung 960 PRO is closer to the budget drives than to the 800p.
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boeush - Thursday, March 8, 2018 - link
P.S. please pardon the "autocorrect"-induced typos... (in the year 2018, still wishing Anandtech would find a way to let us edit our posts...)Calin - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
Unfortunately, if you already have a computer supporting only 32 GB of RAM, the 200$ for an Intel 800p is peanuts compared to what you would have to pay for a system that supports more than 128GB of RAM - both in costs of mainboard, CPU and especially RAM. I'd venture a guess of a $5,000 entry price (you might pay less for refurbished). It might very possibly be worth it, but it's still a $5k against a $200 investmentThe_Assimilator - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
Entry-level Intel Xeon + 1U motherboard with 8x DIMM slots = ~$6008x 32GB modules for 256GB RAM total = ~$3,200
So not quite $5k, but still a lot more than $200 :)
mkaibear - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
...plus a new case, plus a new PSU, plus a UPS...boeush - Saturday, March 10, 2018 - link
Yes, I did mention a lot of $$$...But that's the point: how badly do you really need the extreme random access performance to begin with - above and beyond what a good 1 TB SSD can deliver? Will you even be able to detect the difference? Most workloads are not of such a 'pure' synthetic-like nature, and any decent self-respecting OS will anyway cache your 'hot' files in RAM automatically for you (assuming you have sufficient RAM).
So really, to benefit from such Optane drives (at a cost 4x the equivalent-sized NAND SSD) you'd need to have a very exotic corner-case of a workload - and if you're really into such super-exotic special cases, then likely for you performance trumps cost (and you aren't going to worry so much about +/- a few $thousand here or there...)
jjj - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
Yeah not impressive at all. They can't reach mainstream price points with higher capacity and that leads to less than stellar perf and a very limiting capacity.To some extent, the conversation should also include investing more in DRAM when building a system but that's hard to quantify.
Intel/Micron need the second gen and decent yields, would be nice if that arrives next year- just saying, it's not like they are providing much info on their plans. Gen 2 was initially scheduled for early 2017 but nobody is talking about roadmaps anymore.
jjj - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
Just to add something, NAND prices are coming down some and perf per $ is getting better as more folks join the higher perf party. It's not gonna be trivial to compete with NAND in consumer.CheapSushi - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
Hardware "enthusiasts" have sure become jaded, cynical, grumpy assholes.Reflex - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
No shit. I think people are confusing their anger at Intel with whether or not this is a good tech advancement. I am wondering if they even are looking at the article I saw. The vast majority of the charts showed Optane products in the lead, power consumption lower, latency lower, etc. Only a few places showed it behind, most around scenarios that are not typical.It is fair to point out its not worth 3x the cost. I'm building a system now, not going with Optane at this price. It is fair to point out that the capacity is not there yet. That is another part of why I'm not using it. Those are valid criticisms. They are also things that are likely to be remedied very soon.
What is not fair is to bash it incessantly for reasons imagined in their own minds (OMG IT DOES NOT HIT THE NUMBERS IN A PAPER ABOUT THE POTENTIAL IN ITS FIRST GEN PRODUCTS!), or ignore the fact that we finally have a potentially great storage alternative to NAND which has a number of limitations we have run up against. This is a great thing.
Adramtech - Saturday, March 10, 2018 - link
Agreed, Reflex. In 2 years Optane Gen 2 is likely going to look a lot better and impress. Criticizing Gen 1 tech is ridiculous.