Intel Optane SSD 905P Review: World's Fastest SSD Gets LEDs

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docswag

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What's even the point of the 960gb model if two 480gbs in RAID0 would end up cheaper? Usually higher capacity SSDs have lower price/GB
 

svan71

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each model is $200 more than i'm comfortable spending, at least they should be 512 and 1024. The storage numbers bs should be dealt with. I purchased a 4tb drive once formatted it's 3.6. Thats 400 gb lost simply making the drive usable.
 

dudmont

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Optane doesn't need overprovisioning. No more lost space.

As to the issue of 2 in raid vs 1 big drive. It would be cheaper, but not faster(except in sequential, which doesn't hardly matter, as most users never have circumstances where sequential actually happens).
 

Brian_R170

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I'd like to see some more data on power consumption. My instinct says that since the idle power consumption of Optane is so much higher than a NAND SSD, a typical desktop system with Optane won't be able to compete on power. However, the last paragraph on performance testing gives some hope at least for systems that aren't idle.
 

Brian_R170

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There's the convenience of not having to deal with RAID. I know my time would be worth the extra $100 to never have to deal with it if I didn't have to.

Plus, in theory, 2 drives in RAID have 3 times as many points of failure.
 

takeshi7

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You should do the loading benchmarks in CPU reviews instead of SSD reviews. It's pretty obvious that the storage isn't the bottleneck because all of the numbers are so close regardless of whether it's the Intel 905p or just a SATA SSD. The CPU and/or platform must be the bottleneck.
 

Gillerer

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The issue wasn't with "making the drive usable", but with the fact that a 4 TB drive has 4,000,000,000,000 bytes (usually with a few hundred thousand extra), which is industry standard and correct, since 1 tera = 10^12.

Where it breaks down is when Windows reports file and drive sizes in base 2 while still using base 10 prefixes. A Windows "terabyte" (really tebibyte) equals 1024^4 = 1.0995*10^12.

If you divide the 4,000,000,000,000 with 1.0995^12, you get 3.637. It *should* be labeled TiB, but Windows uses TB.
 

Giroro

Splendid


You don't lose 400 GB due to "formatting" - that's a marketing lie that generally hasn't been applicable since floppy disks. On floppies you could change the amount of space the disk could hold by altering the number/layout of the magnetic tracks - but people don't do that kind of thing with HDDs. SSDs are not magnetic so it is literally impossible to change the amount of flash memory available by changing the format. You can't change physical chips using software. Format in this case means the physical arrangement of data, not what filesystem is being used on the disk.
Now, formatting a disk in Windows generally means to initialize a specific file system (FAT, NTFS) on the disk.
When you format (add a file system) a drive with windows, you do lose a few hundred megabytes as the drive needs a space to save where the files are located. But Windows will display this as used space, not by reducing overall capacity.

To windows, 1 GB = 2^30 Bytes = 1073741824 Bytes
To storage marketers 1 GB is redefined to 10^9 = " 1 Billion Bytes" (There was a lawsuit to stop this because for most other industries it is illegal to redefine units of measure, but the storage companies won since "giga" can mean 10^9 in scientific notation)
What actually ends up on the (raw/"unformatted") drive is often a little bit less than the advertised "1 Billion Bytes", and I have not yet found any other explanation other than false advertisement. I don't think this is a case of over provisioning, but it's not like there's many people out there testing various drives for their true capacites.

Since the old definition of 1GB = 2^30 Bytes is very important for a lot of technical reasons, computer scientists invented a new word "Gibbibyte" to use instead. So now the abbreviation is 1GiB = 2^30 Bytes. Windows still uses the old abbreviation of GB (and maybe Mac/Linux?, I've seen it both ways in android) when they really mean GiB. There is a whole set of equivalents to expresses capacities in binary:
1 Tebibyte (TiB)= 1024 GiB
1024 Mebibyte (MiB) = 1 GiB etc.
Basically say the old words as if you were a baby, and you have the new words. Yes, it's very dumb sounding but extremely important for engineers to be able to speak about this stuff in a non-ambiguous way.

Anyways, the reason you have less capacity than you think you should, is because 1 GB is about 7% smaller than 1 GiB. But the gap gets worse as you move between orders of magnitude. So 1 TB is more like 9% smaller than 1 TiB.
Check an online calculator and you'll see 4TB = 3.63798 TiB (which you'll see as 3.6 TB in Windows) = 3725 GiB

TL;DR Hard drive storage capacities are a deliberately confusing mess, and marketers get away with their obsolete "formatting" explanation because most people don't know the difference. All the data you "lose" never existed in the first place and some judge said that's legal, because of technicalities and math. Also, OS makers aren't exactly helping the situation.
 

Soda-88

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It doesn't matter if I'm surfing the web, moving through a few hundred tabs that I hope to read one day, or loading Command & Conquer to play against my kids.

Yeah, I'm sure that half a second shaved off of a level loading time is very noticable compared to 5 times cheaper MX500.

This product is NOT for gaming despite its predecessor being advertised as such.



I second that. The lack of comprehensive OS/game/application loading time benchmarks between various platforms is puzzling at best.
I'd be very interested in seeing the results between mainstream and HEDT platforms to see if the doubled decompression performance in HEDT case yields any real life improvements.
Also, more importantly Ryzen 2 vs Coffee Lake, seeing as Ryzen does a lot better in that particular task.
 

stdragon

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That endurance is mind-blowing.

For the 960GB model - that lets you write 9.6TB of data per day for five years!

That works out to 111MB/s of sustain writes for 24/7 365 days and 5 years.
 

CRamseyer

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My first tests on a HEDT system (10-core 7900X, X299 chipset) with Optane 905P was under 3 seconds. It was so fast with Optane 905P that I didn't want to even publish the results until I could verify what was happening.
 

valeman2012

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lol these Intel Optane 905P SSD already going on sale 15% off code at Newegg.
 

luckzeh

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To really "benchmark" this drive you'd need to do some extreme multitasking scenario, as in compiling Chromium while loading Skyrim while patching League of Legends (and who knows how many times you gotta do that to get reliable numbers).
 
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