News Optane Lives! This 1.5TB SSD is a great Cyber Monday Deal at an all-time low $399

[Admin]

The 1.5TB Optane 905p is on sale for a mere $399 for Cyber Monday, an all-time low.

Optane Lives! This 1.5TB SSD is a great Cyber Monday Deal at an all-time low $399 : Read more

 

[bit_user]

Interesting find. Here's a better, zoomable view of that graph, since I don't see a zoom button in the article (you can also just right-click it and open the image in a new tab):

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If I could live with a mere 400 GB and really needed it for the performance, I'd still pay 75% more and get the 400 GB P5800X. It's a whole generation newer and uses PCIe 4.0.

• https://www.provantage.com/intel-ssdpf21q400gb01~7ITE93AQ.htm
• https://www.newegg.com/intel-800gb-optane/p/N82E16820167485

The downside of either is that the U.2 enclosure requires cable adapters for most consumer motherboards and burns a lot of power, so you'll want to front-mount it in your case to keep it cool. From the Newegg listing for the 905p (and Intel's stats for the 400 GB P5800X), here are the power figures:

Metric​	905p (960 GB)​	905p (1600 GB)​	P5800X (400 GB)​
Power - Active	16.4 W​	18.6 W​	14.0 W​
Power - Idle	6 W​	6.2 W​	3.8 W​

That's more power than a mechanical 3.5" HDD, both active and idle!

The main reason to buy Optane is for its leading QD1 random IOPS and sustained write performance & endurance. The thing is that most people aren't limited by either of those. We recently saw that most games' loading times aren't even I/O-limited.

Page 2 - SSD Benchmarks Hierarchy: We've tested over 100 different SSDs over the past few years, and here's how they stack up.

Page 2 - Seeking answers? Join the Tom's Hardware community: where nearly two million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.

forums.tomshardware.com

 

[USAFRet]

To all reading this...
One of these will not increase your FPS in games.

That is all....

 

[bit_user]

One of these will not increase your FPS in games.

That is all....

95% agree. However, badly-written games might experience less stuttering.

"The issue purportedly pertains to SSD optimization, with the game file system incessantly relying on very small block sizes and a low queue depth to stream assets into the game."

SSD Usage In Starfield Is Causing Stuttering Issues: Report

DirectStorage is not even required to fix it.

www.tomshardware.com

That goes right to one of these drives' main strengths. I haven't followed the issue, but hopefully the publisher already patched it.

 

[atomicWAR]

95% agree. However, badly-written games might experience less stuttering.

​

"The issue purportedly pertains to SSD optimization, with the game file system incessantly relying on very small block sizes and a low queue depth to stream assets into the game."​

​

SSD Usage In Starfield Is Causing Stuttering Issues: Report

DirectStorage is not even required to fix it.

www.tomshardware.com

​

That goes right to one of these drives' main strengths. I haven't followed the issue, but hopefully the publisher already patched it.

Having 'problem game' drive doesn't actually sound like a bad idea. Put your worst optimized games/new releases on it and as a game is fixed move it to another drive...or not if they don't get it running properly. But generally its likely not worth the cost if I had to guess, for gaming at least. I am half tempted to grab one for an OS drive though...

 

[USAFRet]

I am half tempted to grab one for an OS drive though...

I'm trying really hard to come up with a justification for one of these, to replace the 980 Pro or 660p.

Still not feeling it.

 

[thestryker]

If you're looking at Optane for boot drive just get one of the P1600X 118GB drives and call it good. Plenty large enough for OS install, costs less (more per GB, but you can generally buy them anywhere from $60-75), and will use less power. The only real downside is sequential performance (mine was 1793 read/1071 write when I tested it back when I got it), but this shouldn't really be a problem for an OS drive.

I really wish we'd get some P5800X firesale action, but no other SCM can match it still so I just don't see that ever happening.

 

[Co BIY]

Just because it's not practical for most and least of all me and my use case (Or essentially non-use case?) doesn't mean I don't want one.

I love cobbling stuff together with adapters for theoretical performance gains so I can prove I'm real techie and not just another consumer who doesn't even know how this stuff works.

 

[kiniku]

I've owned 2 Optane drives and I'm a gamer 90% of the time. Random reads and writes do not noticeably improve the consumer PC user experience. Random iOPS improves the opening of numerous small files like Excel Word documents, photos, etc. Where Optane did help significantly was on server storage juggling multiple users making simultaneous requests for small files at once. And Optane has very long longevity. Whereas faster sequential speeds improve the loading of large programs, including demanding games, and booting Windows. Optane died because it did nearly nothing for Windows consumers PCs and it was very expensive. For PC gamer types, Optane was mostly marketing buzzspeak trying to push it to consumers in the hopes of INTEL making their budgets. Back then sequential speeds weren't all that different on conventional Nvme SSDs compared to Optane drives. It failed and INTEL lost a lot of money. Today that is all over. Looking for the fastest? Get yourself an NVME PCI 5.0 SSD. That being said even that isn't really all that different than a PCI 3.0 SSD. But Optane was shuttered by INTEL years ago. For a reason. Unless you are running a multi-user server, don't throw your money away. Today they are trying to unload these on Black Friday to uninformed consumers.

On the upside, I did get the Optane-only Star Citizen ship bundled with my first Optane. LOL

 

[bit_user]

Unless you are running a multi-user server, don't throw your money away.

Even there, they are a niche product. They are typically reserved for things like holding the journal of a filesystem RAID'd over several NAND-based enterprise SSDs or to hold the index for a distributed filesystem. Both write-heavy, high-IOPS tasks, where you don't need a ton of capacity.

Optane died because it did nearly nothing for Windows consumers PCs

Nah, I think consumer was very much a secondary market.

They died because their capacity scaling is so bad that they'd even struggle to be price-competitive against DRAM-based, NAND-backed drives, which would smoke them on performance, where & when it counts.

The P5800X @ 800 GB launched somewhere around $2500, which works out to 0.32 GB/$. Current pricing on 64 GB DDR4 ECC RDIMMs is 0.44 GB/$ (provantage) or as high as 0.91 GB/$ (newegg). So, you could already pack a drive full of it + a battery (and optionally enough NAND to hold a snapshot of the DRAM) for less money. Okay, size and power might be a problem, for now - but, we've been promised die-stacked DDR5, enabling DIMMs with capacities up to 1 TB.

The other thing is, yeah Optane has crazy write endurance. However, to equal a 100 DPWD Optane SSD, you just need a NAND-based drive 10x as big that can manage 10 DWPD. And it'll be cheaper. Or, do the DRAM thing I mentioned and get like 1000 DWPD.

No matter how you look at it, Optane was out of rope. If you can't scale it, the economics just don't work.

 

[thestryker]

Nah, I think consumer was very much a secondary market

I think the argument can be made that it was almost entirely an afterthought because at first Intel didn't think anything of using Optane in SSD form period. It was the worst pivot I've ever seen a company make for what should have been a really good product. They should have just scrapped Optane Persistent Memory (it's very good, but so very very niche) and pushed Optane in SCM SSD format.

Now this might not have saved it as we'll never know if the reason it was axed is that they couldn't continue to layer scale or the capital investment to keep it going simply didn't make sense. I'd like to think it was the former because the latter means it was killed to appease investors.

They died because their capacity scaling is so bad that they'd even struggle to be price-competitive against DRAM-based, NAND-backed drives, which would smoke them on performance, where & when it counts.

Is this currently actually a thing or are you just referring to what CXL can easily enable? I've never come across anyone doing anything like this at all because it's simply not viable for any current server you'd be needing SCM for.

 

[bit_user]

Is this currently actually a thing or are you just referring to what CXL can easily enable? I've never come across anyone doing anything like this at all because it's simply not viable for any current server you'd be needing SCM for.

First, there are NVDIMMs that use other technologies to retain their contents, including battery-backup:

NVDIMM - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

So far, I've only run across one example of a DRAM NVMe drive. So long as a market exists for them, I think we'll see more. I'm having trouble finding the link, but I'll update if/when I find it. I probably saw it on ServeTheHome or Storage Review.

IMO, battery or NAND -backed DRAM drives are a natural and predictable consequence of the melding of NVDIMMs and CXL.mem technologies.

 

[rluker5]

To all reading this...
One of these will not increase your FPS in games.

That is all....

I have Optane in 3 PCs and it seems quite fast to me. But you're right that it generally doesn't increase your FPS. It also can't fix the set time loading screens.
I was thinking of how much faster my Optane seems at loading than my WD SN850x or Hynix Platinum P41 at loading games so I made a video so people could see at least the current one I'm playing on Optane (I didn't move the file over to NAND and do a comparison because of time). If you want to see which won - fast drive or fixed time loading screen check out the spoiler

Spoiler

The loading screen won 🙁

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFDJsRv75SU

I also made sure my OS wasn't stashing the game in ram by doing a fresh reboot before starting it. The load times of those 3 scenes are pretty consistent. In this video I forgot I had my power plan setting the p-cores to 4.4ghz and e-cores to 3.4ghz. I turned it back up 1.1ghz for another one, but that only affected the initial click to loading screen time. The in game loads stayed at about 6, 15 and 10 seconds, respectively for the same scenes. Also sorry about the audio, I have a lot of bass EQ'd and apparently somewhere along the line that got clipped.

Just goes to show that there are diminishing returns above midrange hardware.