Intel Optane 900P

[dullard]

I'm just curious as to what people are thinking about today's new Optane drive:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/11953/the-intel-optane-ssd-900p-review

Costly and power hungry but makes the Samsung 960 Pro look like a slow mechanical drive in heavy use cases (especially with random access). People love to hate Optane, but this is their first product that really looks compelling.

If the price ever got to the $200 range, then I'd be tempted. But, at $389, I can't justify it for my uses.

 

[fleshconsumed]

People don't have optane, they just don't buy into the m.2 optane "accelerator" bullshit. It's far better to just buy NVME M.2 drive and not bother with optane accelerators. Real optane 3d xpoint drives are the real thing and completely different. Good drive, but the price is a bit too high for casual home use. Sure, the drive excels in heavy workloads but real world situations that put that kind of stress on the drive are database, virtual machines, data mining, and you need far more than 240 or 480GB for those. Not to mention the price per GB is high. So as usual, it's an excellent drive, but you got to pay for the bleeding edge performance.

 

[dullard]

People don't have optane, they just don't buy into the m.2 optane "accelerator" bullshit.

Your use of the last word in that sentence, screams that you do hate it. Or at least do not understand it fully and decide to use highly negative words when you could be neutral.

 

[Gunbuster]

Seems odd they have only sampled the lower capacity 240 to reviewers. Is the 480GB a paper launch?

 

[fleshconsumed]

Your use of the last word in that sentence, screams that you do hate it. Or at least do not understand it fully and decide to use highly negative words when you could be neutral.

ROFL, you're sorely mistaken if you think optane is what keeps me up at night...

 

[IntelUser2000]

I am surprised at the pricing. I expected $1000 for 480GB. I mean, their value-focused Optane Memory costs $2.4-2.75/GB. This thing is $1.25-1.39/GB.

But, the gains are limited for consumers. I mean, it's great. SSDs still slow down, for example when you just deleted a large file, the responsiveness slows to a crawl. You need to worry about TRIM support. Dirty drives are slower, often significantly. Full drives are slower. Optane suffers from none of that.

I think the price is totally justified for a dual-drive user that wants to spend money for the best computer.

The real impact we expect from 3D XPoint lies in Optane Memory(surprise!) and eventual Optane DIMMs. The former, needs support for multi-drive and secondary drive configurations. The technical knowledge needed for Optane Memory on a DIY computer can be, depending on your luck steep. But pre-built systems are where the volume will be.

Optane DIMMs won't make any impact on the consumer side, but it will on the server and workstation. Eventually though, that's where the dream is. With OS/BIOS/Application fully built and optimized to work with Optane DIMM, we can ditch the basic computer architecture we've been using for 50 years. The benefits brought on by that will be something everyone will see. Of course that's probably 10 years away.

 

[SinOfLiberty]

........................................

Edited your whole profane post


esquared
Anandtech Forum Director

 

[UsandThem]

It's definitely high-performance aimed at particular users and enthusiasts right now (much like the SSD 750 when it first launched).

That said, it's not something that would interest me at it's current sizes and price. It's just amazing how far the storage segment has come in the last 6 or so years.

 

[dullard]

That said, it's not something that would interest me at it's current sizes and price. It's just amazing how far the storage segment has come in the last 6 or so years.

I agree. Give it another year or two to get a U.2 form factor in a lower price and then I think I'll buy it.

 

[PeterScott]

I am durability nut. So I love that it specs state 10 full Drive Writes per day. Presumable for the full warranty period?

AFAIK Flash memory suffers from bit rot in disuse, I wonder how 3D Xpoint fares.

I can't wait till this get a bit more price/packaging competitive with Flash.

 

[Aikouka]

The drive certainly appears potent in benchmarks, but similar to PCI-E SSDs, we'll likely never see the benefits in most day-to-day tasks.

It's definitely high-performance aimed at particular users and enthusiasts right now (much like the SSD 750 when it first launched).

Based upon Intel's pyramid that Anandtech includes in the article, I get the feeling that Intel is very disconnected from what actual people use in their machines. With the assumption that the two price points listed are overall computer costs, I'm rather baffled as to why Intel thinks a competitive gamer would spend $6000 on a computer. Even with going a little too much into some parts on my Coffee Lake build, I still didn't spend half of that, and that was with no component reuse... not even hard drives (peripherals not included).

Also, I see that the 280GB model is available in a U.2 format, and while I haven't looked at all Z370 boards, I don't recall seeing a single one with U.2. I did see Z270 boards with it, but I think manufacturers realized that no one was using it. Now, it looks like you need to use a M.2-to-U.2 conversion board (like this one from MSI) to get it.

 

[NCIXGreg]

I'm just curious as to what people are thinking about today's new Optane drive:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/11953/the-intel-optane-ssd-900p-review

Costly and power hungry but makes the Samsung 960 Pro look like a slow mechanical drive in heavy use cases (especially with random access). People love to hate Optane, but this is their first product that really looks compelling.

If the price ever got to the $200 range, then I'd be tempted. But, at $389, I can't justify it for my uses.

Intel's X25 160GB drives were around that price when they first came out, and they were worth it.

It'll be interesting to watch the tech evolve over the next few years as SSDs have. Hopefully enough people keep buying Optane so Intel keeps improving them.

 

[Johnny Lucky]

Three technical reviews were published this morning - AnandTech, PC Perspective, and Tom's Hardware. Intel did not send any 900P's to other web sites for review. After reading all three reviews I have come to the conclusion the 900P is definitely high performance but it is overkill for me. I am satisfied that my current system is more than sufficient for what I actually do with it.

I plan to wait and see what happens. For those that may not know it yet, the new standard for PCIe 4.0 has been approved and released. This time next year we will be looking at new motherboards, cpu's, gpu's, and ssd's that are PCIe 4.0 compliant.

 

[IntelUser2000]

AFAIK Flash memory suffers from bit rot in disuse, I wonder how 3D Xpoint fares.

I'm not sure if it'll fare better. Obviously SSD-oriented Optane will be targeted for similar no-use retention times.

There was a slide from Micron that was discussing future NV memories like 3D XPoint. On the part where it showed data retention, it had DRAM in the very left of the scale(very low data retention rate), and SSDs on the very right of the scale(very high data retention rate). The technology that seemed like 3D XPoint had two versions essentially - One, where performance would be in the middle ground between DRAM and NAND, cost that would be closer to NAND, and retention rate that's pretty much like NAND. Two, where the performance and the cost would be close to DRAM. The retention rate on the scale wasn't all the way left as with DRAM, but closer to it than on the very right of the scale.

It looked to me to get the performance at DRAM-levels, they had to sacrifice some data retention times to do so. Like it was a balancing act. I'm hoping for the sake of advancement, Optane DIMMs coming next year doesn't have to sacrifice data retention times that much to achieve DRAM-comparable speeds.

It's amazing how everything is a trade-off in life. The almost painful to use Tape Drives are known to have best long term storage characteristics. The much faster HDDs are good, but not in terms of storage. SSDs are even faster than HDDs, and they have a rather short long term storage time.

For those that may not know it yet, the new standard for PCIe 4.0 has been approved and released.

PCIe throughput isn't as important as latency. This 900P drive isn't even at the 4GB/s PCIe x4 interface is capable of.

 

[NCIXGreg]

The technology that seemed like 3D XPoint had two versions essentially - One, where performance would be in the middle ground between DRAM and NAND, cost that would be closer to NAND, and retention rate that's pretty much like NAND. Two, where the performance and the cost would be close to DRAM.

Using Optane as DRAM will definitely have some advantages in specialized fields.

For example, an Animation rendering farm that may need to access 1-2TB of textures for any given frame will find that even SSD latency times can slow down the rendering process. Moving the storage of textures off of HDDs and SSDs into "RAM" could see a dramatic decrease in rendering times.

 

[DaveSimmons]

It seems like a very niche product to me. It looks nice in the Destroyer benchmark but drop down to the more real-world Heavy and it's not twice as good as a 960 Pro.

 

[dbrons]

It seems like a very niche product to me.

Call it a niche, but I think I'm in it as a person who is building a coffee lake system right now and would like to have the fastest drive even if it costs a bit more. I was planning on the 512 gb 960Pro and now I'm reading up on the Optane drives. I would need to do with half the capacity (same as I have done fine with in my current system - 950Pro 256gb), or else spend twice as much for the 240 gb which doesn't seem to be avail yet.

I'm leaning towards the smaller 240gb Optane as I'm spending a lot on this new system and the extra cost is minimal. The 250 gb space in my system drive hasn't really affected me so far and I like what I've read about how Optane runs when close to full. In any case it's kinda fun to be trying out some new technology in this system, ddr4, usb 3.1, and maybe 3D XPoint. Funny, I was excited to be trying out an NVMe drive for the first time.
Dave


PS I would welcome suggestions or advice on my 8700k build which I will use to work on my large video and audio collections. will be keeping my current system as storage, media server.

 

[ksec]

1. The Price is much lower then what i expected and what it is performing.

2. Sure it may not matter for 95% of consumer computing, but for those who need the specific performance, I consider this a bargain.

3. I wish someone could test this on PostgreSQL or other DB. Consider the wearing level of SSD and its TCO, the use case for Optane on Write heavy DB may actually put Optane VERY favorably.

4. While the Random Read Write performance wont change with higher capacity, what are the reason Optane gets a slow throughput? I was expecting 4GB/s or even pushing for PCI-E 4.0 spec.

5. God this thing is power hungry, I wonder if it was the controller of the Optane memory itself. We are talking about idle power of 0.5W to 5W difference.

6. It doesn't state the controller die size and Optane Memory physical space. i.e is there any inherit advantage to physical size. Fitting more in less space? ( Likely Not, but would be nice to know for sure )

7. I am wondering, if the benchmarks and test aren't giving the real benefits of Optane. In theory, deleting, moving, making any sort of random open read changes should not results in UI jank, or system halt on Optane unless they required something that is CPU bond like Virus Scanning. But we continue to witness this on SSD,

May be we should rethink the test and test something more specific?

For now, it is early stage but i really like what Optane is doing, there is much less black magic happening comparing to SSD. And its simplicity ( for now ) may be its strength.

 

[IntelUser2000]

1. The Price is much lower then what i expected and what it is performing.

Yep. I was expecting $1000+ for the 480GB version.

4. While the Random Read Write performance wont change with higher capacity, what are the reason Optane gets a slow throughput? I was expecting 4GB/s or even pushing for PCI-E 4.0 spec.

Need more parallelism, meaning more channels. You can see with Optane Memory, 1 chip 16GB version gets 140MB/s write, and 2 chip 32GB version gets 280MB/s write throughput.

Based on specs it sounds like 900P uses a modified controller based on the 750/P3700 series.

5. God this thing is power hungry, I wonder if it was the controller of the Optane memory itself. We are talking about idle power of 0.5W to 5W difference.

It's actually not.

Intel SSD 750, which are basically consumer versions of P3700, are rated at 4W idle/9-22W(9W read/12W write for 400GB) peak depending on capacity. The P3700 is rated the same. The Optane is rated at 5W idle, and 8W read, 14W write, which is pretty much on the level of the lowest capacity P3700/750. Again, I assume its because they use modified but similar controllers.

On that note, their SATA-based SSD 730 seems to have comparable power figures to Optane Memory. SSD 730 is rated at 3.8-5.5W depending on capacity, with 1.5W idle. Optane memory is rated at 3.5W load and 1W idle.

7. I am wondering, if the benchmarks and test aren't giving the real benefits of Optane. In theory, deleting, moving, making any sort of random open read changes should not results in UI jank, or system halt on Optane unless they required something that is CPU bond like Virus Scanning. But we continue to witness this on SSD,

PC Perspective review points out that the slowdown in responsiveness that happens in SSDs after large file delete does not happen on the 900P.

And its simplicity ( for now ) may be its strength.

Yes. Not needing big buffers or even DRAM chips mean they can forgo large specialized capacitors for flushing in case of power failures. If the controller has buffers it may still need dedicated capacitors, but simpler because the buffers are likely in the KB range.

 

[ksec]

On that note, their SATA-based SSD 730 seems to have comparable power figures to Optane Memory. SSD 730 is rated at 3.8-5.5W depending on capacity, with 1.5W idle. Optane memory is rated at 3.5W load and 1W idle.

If that is the case I assume a lot of these power consumption is controller itself, but if you compared to many other Controllers, idle is still quite power expensive.

So both bandwidth and controller is fixable. Not sure if it will ever be low enough for mobile use but this is VERY interesting tech.

 

[Edrick]

I'm buying one damit. I am on Newegg's waiting list (hopefully today). I cant wait to see how this works on a Sky-X system running off CPU PCIe lanes. And I can compare it directly to my Samsung 960 Pro.

 

[dahorns]

I'm buying one damit. I am on Newegg's waiting list (hopefully today). I cant wait to see how this works on a Sky-X system running off CPU PCIe lanes. And I can compare it directly to my Samsung 960 Pro.

Which size? Do share the results when you get it.

 

[Edrick]

Which size? Do share the results when you get it.

Whichever size I can get first. There is no performance difference between the 2. But I will not be getting a U.2 drive as I want to leverage my CPU lanes. I am only going to be using this for my OS/Application drive so anything over 180GB works for me.

 

[dbrons]

Yeah I'm seriously considering also I'll be building my new system this weekend. I've been thinking of just going with the Samsung 960 that I had originally planned.

I called both NewEgg and Intel to try to get some guidance which version to use and they couldn't help, they day I should ask Asus! I get the impression the u.2 drive comes with some sort of adapter and not sure how messed up that will look, or if it's reliable. I was figuring on getting the one that plugs into a pic slot but not sure which one.

With tax this would cost me an extra 150 or 160 so I'm beginning to think might not be worth the bragging rights.

 

[ksec]

Whichever size I can get first. There is no performance difference between the 2. But I will not be getting a U.2 drive as I want to leverage my CPU lanes. I am only going to be using this for my OS/Application drive so anything over 180GB works for me.

Something I forgot. Did Anantech test the Optane via CPU Direct PCI-E or via their bridge?

I cant find any mentions in the article.