The Intel Optane SSD 800p (58GB & 118GB) Review: Almost The Right Size
by Billy Tallis on March 8, 2018 5:15 PM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy
Our Heavy storage benchmark is proportionally more write-heavy than The Destroyer, but much shorter overall. The total writes in the Heavy test aren't enough to fill the drive, so performance never drops down to steady state. This test is far more representative of a power user's day to day usage, and is heavily influenced by the drive's peak performance. The Heavy workload test details can be found here. This test is run twice, once on a freshly erased drive and once after filling the drive with sequential writes.
As with The Destroyer, the average data rate of the Intel Optane SSD 800p puts it near the top of the rankings, but behind the fastest flash-based SSDs and the Optane 900p. Intel's VROC again adds overhead that isn't worthwhile without the high queue depths of synthetic benchmarks.
The average and 99th percentile latencies of the Optane SSD 800p on the Heavy test are better than any of the low-end NVMe SSDs, but it is only in RAID that the latency drops down to the level of the best flash-based SSDs and the 900p.
The average read latency of the Optane SSD 800p ranks second behind the 900p. VROC adds enough overhead that the RAID configurations end up having slightly higher average read latencies than the Samsung 960 PRO. For the average write latencies, VROC is far more useful, and helps the 800p make up for the lack of a write cache.
The 99th percentile read and write latencies of the 800p RAID configurations are on par with the 900p, but the individual drives have slightly worse QoS than the Samsung 960 PRO.
The 800p again leads in energy usage thanks to its high overall performance without the high baseline power consumption of the 900p. The budget NVMe SSDs all use at least twice as much energy over the course of the test, and the Samsung 960 PRO is closer to the budget drives than to the 800p.
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Alexvrb - Saturday, March 10, 2018 - link
Calin you are obviously too young to remember some of the early "affordable" consumer NAND SSDs. Hammer them a bit and they stalled... producing worse results than a lot of fast HDDs... especially in random writes. Sequential speeds were never a major issue that I can recall.The_Assimilator - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
Trying to equate a NAND-to-Optane transition to the mechanical-HDD-to-SSD transition is laughable.wumpus - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
The moment pseudo-SLC in TLC showed up, Optane was pretty much dead in the SSD market. They would presumably compete with SLC (does anybody still make it?), but TLC is the coffin nail in consumer markets.From the moment the 3d-xpoint hypetrane started, it was clear that it would try to wedge itself into the memory hierarchy, presumably between flash and DRAM, and hopes for replacing flash.
Flash isn't going anywhere, and 3d-xpoint hasn't shown the endurance needed for a fast-paging DRAM replacement. It certainly wouldn't replace *all* DRAM, but anyone who's seen a 4GB machine actually function (slow, but they do work) knows that nearly all that expensive (hopefully DDR4 will fall back to Earth) DRAM could be replaced by something sufficiently fast, but neither flash nor 3d-xpoint is quite there.
To compound the problems, Intel decided that "Optane in a DDR4 slot" would be strictly proprietary. So there are marketing/political problems trying to get manufacturers to support it as well as technical issues to make the stuff.
name99 - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
Consumer NAND launched in an environment where it had SOME spaces where it was optimal, and so had the chance to grow. It started in phones and DAPs, then grew to ultra-laptops, and finally the desktop. Point is --- there were niches that could pay for on-going improvement.Octane is different because there is NO obvious niche that justifies continuing to pump money into it. The niche that was SUPPOSED to justify it (NV-DIMMs) is STILL MIA years after it was promised...
iwod - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
I am all for super fast QD1 results. But so far none of the application seems to benefits from it. At least not according to test results. I am wonder, we are either testing it wrong, looking at the wrong thing, or the benefits of QD1 is over thought and bottleneck is somewhere else.And NAND continues to get bigger better and faster. We may be looking at below $100 250GB SSD this year.
iter - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
Exactly. It is hilarious how them fanboys keep claiming that we overlook the advantages, when I explicitly state them almost every time.There are very little and far in between workloads where those advantages can translate into tangible improvement of real world performance.
When your bottleneck is a human being interacting via input devices, discrete savings of several dozens of microseconds are simply not perceivable.
Even cumulative savings are in fact not, because most of the time that data has to also be processed by the cpu, which is why synthetics aside, raw real world applications snow minuscule going from a decent ssd to a crazy fast nvme device.
sor - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
Probably has something to do with your name calling and “it keeps getting worse and worse” when that objectively isn’t true. You come off as having an axe to grind.It is not true that this is worse and worse. The power improvements shown here are quite impressive. Low QD performance is still better than NAND by an order of magnitude, and looks to have gotten a roughly 20% improvement. Sequential read now even beats NAND.
You and others are falling over yourselves to crap on it for some strange reason, and clearly are ignoring the upsides. It’s just a product.
iter - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
"when that objectively isn’t true"It absolutely is. It is slower than the 900p. They improved power a bit - big whoop, especially considering it came at the cost of gutting the interface by 50%.
118 GB? I bet enthusiasts all over the planet are drooling about that crazy capacity. Not to mention the smaller model...
Nobody denies the strong points, it is just that they are way too little to make this a good product.
Instead of getting bigger and faster it gets smaller and slower.
And somehow the price per GB increases.
Truly impressive.
nevcairiel - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
If you want to go down that road, at current consumer SSD speeds (say Samsung 960 Pro), I doubt any normal user would even notice if the performance suddenly doubled (or halfed, for that matter).Does that mean we should not innovate? Perhaps consumer work-load isn't the main goal, but if you have the hardware, why not try to make a consumer product, anyway.
MrSpadge - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
With decently fast SATA SSDs the bottleneck is almsot entirely the CPU already, unless you've got purely I/O load.