Intel Announces Optane SSD 905P

[Guest]

Intel officially announced the new Optane SSD 905P 960GB add-in card and 480GB 2.5" U.2.

Intel Announces Optane SSD 905P : Read more

 

[dudmont]

Improved Optane or is the controller at play here?

 

[WyomingKnott]

An SSD that is significantly faster than others, but only in random access. Sequential read and write are both exceeded at all depths by the Samsung 970 Pro (Ok, not a consumer device?), in write by the SanDisk and the 970 EVO, in write by the HP EX920. It starts at the top at QD1 for random reads and writes, and smokes the competition at higher QD. Might it be inappropriate for even the high-end consumers?

Of course, a hard drive is perfectly good for most sequential applications, like playing video, but video editors might find this the fastest

 

[leoscott]

Considering Newegg has the 970 1tb for 351 (m.2), or 27% of the price of this Optane, 11% performance improvement just doesn't sound that impressive. MEH

 

[Nintendork]

Editing mostly depends on sequential, so optane doesn't bring that much, for other cases is way faster.

Most prosumer usages don't really benefit from extremely high random performance.

 

[bit_user]

An SSD that is significantly faster than others, but only in random access. Sequential read and write are both exceeded at all depths

You can always improve sequential performance by taking a given storage device and striping it.

Random performance (reads, at least) is final. There's not really anything a user can do to improve it.

 

[lorfa]

Graph says "Plextor 970 pro".. again. (First graph)

 

[bit_user]

Considering Newegg has the 970 1tb for 351 (m.2), or 27% of the price of this Optane, 11% performance improvement just doesn't sound that impressive.

You're missing the point of this drive. Look at the QD=1 random reads. It's at least as much as that price difference.

 

[DavidC1]

An SSD that is significantly faster than others, but only in random access. Sequential read and write are both exceeded at all depths by the Samsung 970 Pro (Ok, not a consumer device?), in write by the SanDisk and the 970 EVO, in write by the HP EX920. It starts at the top at QD1 for random reads and writes, and smokes the competition at higher QD. Might it be inappropriate for even the high-end consumers?

The NAND SSDs can't maintain their performance when the drive starts to get full, have to rely on TRIM to get rid of the so-called dirty state. Other reviews of Optane said while even high end SSDs like the 960 Pro slows down for a bit after deleting a large file, it doesn't matter with Optane.

If you want the best, this is it.

 

[bit_user]

The NAND SSDs can't maintain their performance when the drive starts to get full, have to rely on TRIM to get rid of the so-called dirty state. Other reviews of Optane said while even high end SSDs like the 960 Pro slows down for a bit after deleting a large file, it doesn't matter with Optane.

This is a good point. 3D XPoint is bit-addressable and more resilient than NAND. There's no need for TRIM and there should be no penalty on small writes (i.e. read-mod-write).

I would like to see performance data for random writes < 4k.

 

[iopssopi]

Intel gone crazy expensive again...

Triple the price for twice the performance.

 

[hannibal]

Normal...
Nvidia Titan x vs normal ti... the very highest end cost a lot always.

 

[Ninjawithagun]

Uh, no. First of all, the first chart is incorrect. The Samsung 970 EVO does NOT average only 539 MB/sec. Secondly, and more importantly is the exorbitant cost difference. The 970 EVO is a much better deal being almost a 3rd of the price of the Optane 905P. The choice is simple here; Samsung. And if you want to complain about apples-to-oranges comparing the Optane to the EVO, then bring in Samsung's Pro version and it is still way better in the price vs. performance.

 

[waltsmith]

Correction, you say 905p is 300% faster than the EVO, it's 3 times. That's 200%.

 

[WyomingKnott]

@waltsmith, that's what advertising has done to language. If the other company's box has 10 oz, and our box has 15 oz for the same price, it's 150% more. I like to expose the fallacy with "10 is 50% more than 20?"

I had to teach my daughter two ways of doing this in early math. There was the incorrect ad-speak answer the teacher expected, and the correct answer.

The New York Times deals with this by not using "% more" or "% less." Only "% as much as."

The upshot is that there's a difference between real math and the incorrect way language is commonly used today. Maybe Tom's should emulate the Times.

 

[Brian_R170]

Editing mostly depends on sequential, so optane doesn't bring that much, for other cases is way faster.

Most prosumer usages don't really benefit from extremely high random performance.

But editing tends to be mixed sequential, right? Which is another thing Optane does exceptionally well.

It would be interesting to run some storage-intensive pro-sumer benchmarks on Optane.

 

[Giroro]

Does this drive work as well with Ryzen?

What about using Optane as a cache?

 

[dark_lord69]

Editing mostly depends on sequential, so optane doesn't bring that much, for other cases is way faster.

Most prosumer usages don't really benefit from extremely high random performance.

Prosumer.. yeah maybe people using workstations...

However... Datacenters use IOPS as the, go to drive performance metric.
Depending on the usage and number of users, some datacenters need storage solutions with IOPS that are off the charts.

This drive, has the highest IOPS numbers I've seen on a single drive.

 

[jimmysmitty]

Editing mostly depends on sequential, so optane doesn't bring that much, for other cases is way faster.

Most prosumer usages don't really benefit from extremely high random performance.

Prosumer.. yeah maybe people using workstations...

However... Datacenters use IOPS as the, go to drive performance metric.
Depending on the usage and number of users, some datacenters need storage solutions with IOPS that are off the charts.

This drive, has the highest IOPS numbers I've seen on a single drive.

Not only the highest but also the most consistent. Most SSDs still have IOPS drop off across workloads and other QDs. This just chews through them.

 

[USAFRet]

Eventually, this and its brethren will be mainstream.
Much like SSD's when they first came out in the consumer space. Way too small and way to expensive per GB.
Eventually.

For now, $1300 for 1TB is way too much for the majority of us.

 

[DavidC1]

I would like to see performance data for random writes < 4k.

I don't think this matters until it moves from the NVMe interface to DRAM. This particular drive is NVMe and it does everything in 4K block sizes, mostly because to maintain compatibility with the existing drives.

Uh, no. First of all, the first chart is incorrect. The Samsung 970 EVO does NOT average only 539 MB/sec

In this case, it does. The workload benchmark is likely based off PCMark's storage test, and their figures aren't simple sequential testing you see in other benchmarks.

While the pricing itself isn't good for most folks, if you want the best this is it.

 

[bit_user]

Uh, no. First of all, the first chart is incorrect. The Samsung 970 EVO does NOT average only 539 MB/sec.

As DavidC1 said, this chart is some sort of composite score. They really should've clarified that.

 

[josh283407]

11%percent depends on what you are measuring. the low que depth numbers are optanes real strength. to bad there arent many use cases for it. i wonder about using this as a page file for really large data sets. but if you can afford this drive you can afford the ram that would make it unnecessary. limited to pro apps for now most definitely. could change one day

 

[bit_user]

It would be interesting to run some storage-intensive pro-sumer benchmarks on Optane.

Where I would expect this to shine:

• 
  ■ boot up, shutdown, and in to / out of hibernation
  ■ finding files without an index
  ■ changing the attributes of a large tree of files (especially, on the same drive)
  ■ copying a large tree of files (again, with focus on 905P as both the source and destination)
  ■ swap (virtual memory)
  ■ large, structured datasets that won't fit in RAM - GIS, volumetric data, enormous CAD models.
  ■ large software builds on high-core count machines.
  ■ various operations on large databases (esp. low-overhead, like sqlite, and esp. in latency-sensitive scenarios)

There aren't many places where a normal desktop user would really notice an improvement, making it the kind of thing you only buy for very specific needs or to max out a rig that's already over-the-top.

 

[USAFRet]

There aren't many places where a normal desktop user would really notice an improvement, making it the kind of thing you only buy for very specific needs or to max out a rig that's already over-the-top.

And yet every day here, we see people thinking they NEED to move to an Optane, either as a full drive, or as a cache for their already existing SSD. For a regular gaming rig.

Every day.