News Optane's Final Voyage: Intel Quietly Launches P5810X SSDs

[Admin]

Intel's Optane SSD DC P5810X drives in 400GB, and 800GB capacities are now shipping.

Optane's Final Voyage: Intel Quietly Launches P5810X SSDs : Read more

 

[helper800]

Ill buy a 2 drives and leave one in the box as an investment. May be worth something to a collector some day.

 

[bit_user]

Meanwhile, the new P5810X drives have a considerably higher active power rating than their P5810X brethren

I'm guessing the second one should be "P5800X".

I stumbled across these, a month ago, while looking up the P5800X on ark.intel.com.

 

[2Be_or_Not2Be]

Ill buy a 2 drives and leave one in the box as an investment. May be worth something to a collector some day.

If you can even find them! Newegg has the P5800X in U.2 format listed for a lot higher than it should be, based upon prev gen pricing. I'm not even sure where you would get the P5810X, unless you have a business connection with some distributors like Ingram Micro, etc.

I would be drooling over a drive that matches the best PCIe 4.0 x4 drives in r/w, but beat all of them in latency & sheer responsiveness. The higher price, of course, is why Intel decided it wasn't going to continue. But I guess if you have to have it, especially for a replacement/expansion of a server currently with Optane drives as primary storage, you'll pay the price. 'Cause if you only use Optane, you probably have a specific performance reason for it, and the pricing of the drives is only a bump in the road.

 

[Mpablo87]

Intel Quietly ? ?
Good Intel !

 

[bit_user]

If you can even find them! Newegg has the P5800X in U.2 format listed for a lot higher than it should be, based upon prev gen pricing.

For a while, you could buy the 400 GB model directly from Newegg for $1057. That's the best online price I saw for it, except when you factor in their markdown they had during the Oct 12-13 SSD sale (but it was sold out, by the time I even noticed). I no longer see them listing the 400 GB model as "sold by Newegg". So, I guess they're not expecting any more to come back in stock?

As for U.2 vs PCIe half-height/half-length, I have only ever seen the P5800X in U.2 form factor. And I definitely looked around. I don't mind, because my drive bays are directly behind a big 140 mm intake fan, whereas the PCIe cards are passively cooled and wouldn't get as much airflow. The only annoying part is having to buy a ~$35 adapter + cable to connect it to a M.2 slot.

I'm not even sure where you would get the P5810X, unless you have a business connection with some distributors like Ingram Micro, etc.

Yeah... the P5800X wasn't exactly a retail product, but at least they were individually packaged. It could be that the P5810X is only available in bulk.

I would be drooling over a drive that matches the best PCIe 4.0 x4 drives in r/w, but beat all of them in latency & sheer responsiveness.

I'm conflicted about whether to use it, because disk caching and write buffering works really well. So, the advantage over a reasonably fast SSD is probably going to be unnoticeable by me.

The higher price, of course, is why Intel decided it wasn't going to continue.

I think Intel cancelled it when they noticed battery-backed RAM was both faster and a similar cost per GB. If you add some NAND, the battery just has to be big enough to save the contents on power-loss. Maybe a super-capacitor would even be enough?

And as good as the new drive's endurance is (100 DWPD!), DRAM is far better.

But I guess if you have to have it, especially for a replacement/expansion of a server currently with Optane drives as primary storage, you'll pay the price. 'Cause if you only use Optane, you probably have a specific performance reason for it, and the pricing of the drives is only a bump in the road.

It's really for use cases like databases and storing index data for distributed filesystems that Optane comes into its own. Also, super write-heavy use cases that would wear out NAND drives too rapidly.

 

[polnoch]

I'm owner of INTEL SSDPEK1W120GA. And I can say, it's very sad that they killed optane. Why? Because I use this drive for SWAP for host system and VMs. And it's very first time in my life when I never see out-of-memory things... Optane has latency in about 10 times less than just normal nvme SSD, also it has good durability - exactly what is important for a swap.

 

[bit_user]

it's very sad that they killed optane. Why?

I know it's kind of buried in a longish post (above), but the best explanation I've heard is:

"I think Intel cancelled it when they noticed battery-backed RAM was both faster and a similar cost per GB."​

The math is just upside down, for Optane. They couldn't get good scaling in the vertical direction, and I don't know if areal density is even scaling as well as DRAM, much less NAND.

Because I use this drive for SWAP for host system and VMs. And it's very first time in my life when I never see out-of-memory things... Optane has latency in about 10 times less than just normal nvme SSD, also it has good durability - exactly what is important for a swap.

Ideally, don't over-provision your VMs' memory, and then you shouldn't have so many issues with swapping. But, if you must provision more total RAM than you have on the host, I agree that a fast swap drive is very beneficial.

However, if the host can accommodate more DRAM, that's an even better option and probably not much more expensive than relying on Optane-backed swap.

Either way, another thing you might look into is memory-compression. I think there are a couple different implementations, but one is called ZRAM. I have no experience with them.