Intel Announces Optane SSD 905P

[bit_user]

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.

In a NVMe drive, 3D XPoint seems almost perfectly suited to various datacenter & cloud workloads.

If you compare the price of this drive to the equivalent P4800X, I suppose we should appreciate that Intel has offered it at a price point within the reach of many PC builders. It will make sense for a few users, but most of those will probably know who they are.

Looking ahead, I can see some interesting consumer applications with Optane DIMMs.

 

[alextheblue]

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.

I hardly see anyone advocating the NEED to move to Optane for a gaming rig especially now. Doesn't make sense until you've maxed everything else.

But maybe some day when they're even faster and cheaper, it might be worth slapping one in a PCIe slot as a boot drive or cache for an NVMe drive. You never know in a couple years it might make sense... then again we might have viable alternatives and PCIe 5.0 storage feeding 16 core desktop CPUs.

 

[casgon2018]

Cool....but $1299....Its crazy price. Also, it doesn't make much of a difference to end users. Unless you have several of these drives and enjoy transferring files between them

 

[casgon2018]

Cool!! $1299 for 1TB drive........

I understand its fast and nice but its just way overpriced!! I never used optane before but I do have 950 Pro. Its just the same as any SATA SSD........I realise one thing. No doubt the nvme SSD can managed 2000MB/s transfer.....but where are you doing to transfer to? Unless you have another SSD of the same speed (or RAM drive), it will never hit that speed.

So in the end.....you will never see that speed except in benchmarks.......This is why I decide that size matters more than speed.....

 

[JonDol]

Cool!! $1299 for 1TB drive........

I understand its fast and nice but its just way overpriced!! I never used optane before but I do have 950 Pro. Its just the same as any SATA SSD........I realise one thing. No doubt the nvme SSD can managed 2000MB/s transfer.....but where are you doing to transfer to? Unless you have another SSD of the same speed (or RAM drive), it will never hit that speed.

So in the end.....you will never see that speed except in benchmarks.......This is why I decide that size matters more than speed.....

You'll also see that speed at boot time: got a 960 Pro booting in about 6 seconds from shut down thus I no longer see a reason for the sleep/hibernation modes.

There is not only speed with this drive but also edurance. Then comes the same eternal debate of where should you buy an umbrella that will withstand 2 windy rains or buy a 3 times more expensive one that will withstand 10 windy rains. The time you spend buying your new umbrella also costs money...

 

[philbee]

But check out that endurance rating. That is quite impressive. Ten Drive Writes Per Day would make for a good scratch disk for applications on servers that are I/O intensive.

 

[WyomingKnott]

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

True. But remember all the people posting that they definitely would not buy an SSD until they were below $1 / GB? This is close.

 

[USAFRet]

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

True. But remember all the people posting that they definitely would not buy an SSD until they were below $1 / GB? This is close.

860 EVO 1TB SATA III - $280
https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-Inch-Internal-MZ-76E1T0B-AM/dp/B078DPCY3T

960 PRO 1TB NVMe - $606
https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-960-PRO-Internal-MZ-V6P1T0BW/dp/B01LYRCIPG

Optane 905P 1TB - $1300


For twice the price of the 960 Pro, would I see twice the performance?
Doubtful.

 

[alextheblue]

For twice the price of the 960 Pro, would I see twice the performance?
Doubtful.

I'm going to introduce you to a new mind blowing concept: Diminishing Returns™. 😛
If you've got the need for speed, there it is. The fastest of the fast. The Pentium Extreme Titan XXX of storage. Whether you actually NEED it (for professional reasons) or just plain have the money to burn, there it is. As someone pointed out, you can't just RAID it up and boost your random IOPS.

In a year or two maybe one of these faster-than-conventional-NAND technologies will even be relatively affordable. Or maybe they'll just keep getting faster, fast enough that we use them for cache/boot drives, thus repeating the last cycle. At this point I'd be OK with NAND just breaking capacity barriers rather than speed, so I can ditch spinners entirely and use NAND for bulk storage. Either way it's fun to watch it unfold.

 

[emv]

Can I see the comparison on photoshop, Office, WOW? I dont think it is measurably faster for any real application. The graphs dont lie. Thats why it isnt selling well.

 

[bit_user]

Thats why it isnt selling well.

According to whom?

 

[emv]

Thats why it isnt selling well.

According to whom?

Intel

 

[bit_user]

Thats why it isnt selling well.

According to whom?

Intel

Okay, so where and when did they say this?

 

[rjk196830]

Never look at the sequential read and writes. It is a rare scenario and mostly theoretical at best. Most operations for Disk I/O are random read and writes (unless you ONLY copy movies or large files), look closely at the 4K access. And you really need to look also at the IOPS.
By far what makes this drive different is the "non-SSD" like behavior for changing "bits" in place. All other standard SSD's use block transfer for any file. If a user changes one bit in a 4 MB file, a standard FLASH based SSD copies the full 4 MB and modifies that one bit. These 905P/900P drives don't. They change the bits in place. No TRIM required, no garbage collection, no wear leveling...
These new drives are classes better and superior to a 970 PRO/EVO.
And last but not least, if you have a 970 Pro full at 95% look at the performance. The 905P performs the same even at 99.99% while the 970 PRO will probably crawl at 95% because it is a FLASH based SSD. They inherently slow down the fuller they get.
This is a no-brainer if you understand the difference between Flash based NVMe SSD's and the 3D Xpoint SSD's. The 905/900P are really that good as described in the article. There is anything else out there you could compare it to by a long shot.

 

[bit_user]

Never look at the sequential read and writes. It is a rare scenario and mostly theoretical at best. Most operations for Disk I/O are random read and writes (unless you ONLY copy movies or large files), look closely at the 4K access. And you really need to look also at the IOPS.

Perceivable user experience is mostly a function of sequential read and low-QD IOPS.

By far what makes this drive different is the "non-SSD" like behavior for changing "bits" in place. All other standard SSD's use block transfer for any file. If a user changes one bit in a 4 MB file, a standard FLASH based SSD copies the full 4 MB and modifies that one bit.

Not true. Filesystems will update an entire block (512 bytes or 4 kB), but not the whole file. No SSD will support modifying individual bits, because the necessary filesystem and SATA/NVMe commands are lacking.

These 905P/900P drives don't. They change the bits in place.

I suppose they could optimize read-modify-write to only write the bits which differ, thereby trading some performance & power-efficiency for longevity, but my spidey sense says the don't.

No TRIM required, no garbage collection, no wear leveling...

Color me skeptical. They have better endurance than NAND, but nothing like what Intel originally claimed. I'd guess they still need wear leveling, and TRIM helps with that.