The Intel Optane SSD 900p 480GB Review: Diving Deeper Into 3D XPoint
by Billy Tallis on December 15, 2017 12:15 PM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Light
Our Light storage test has relatively more sequential accesses and lower queue depths than The Destroyer or the Heavy test, and it's by far the shortest test overall. It's based largely on applications that aren't highly dependent on storage performance, so this is a test more of application launch times and file load times. This test can be seen as the sum of all the little delays in daily usage, but with the idle times trimmed to 25ms it takes less than half an hour to run. Details of the Light test can be found here. As with the ATSB Heavy test, this test is run with the drive both freshly erased and empty, and after filling the drive with sequential writes.
The Light test shows much greater differences between full and empty drive performance, for both flash SSDs and for the rather variable 280GB Optane SSD 900p. The 480GB model shows less variation in its average data rater between the full and empty runs. Overall, the Optane SSDs outperform a full flash-based SSD but are unimpressive compared to a fresh out of the box flash-based SSD.
Aside from the different behavior of full vs empty, the average and 99th percentile latency scores of the Optane SSDs are not too interesting. The best-case performance is not quite as fast as the best from a flash based SSD, but once the flash drive is slowed down by being full, the Optane SSD shows a meaningful latency advantage.
The average read latency of the Optane SSDs on the Light test is not hurt by filling the drive, giving it much better latency in the worst case scenario than any flash-based SSD. When the Light test is run on freshly-erased drives, the Optane SSD's average read latency is about the same as the best flash-based drives. Neither Optane SSD sets a record for average write latency, and Samsung's fastest NVMe drives have a clear advantage.
As with the average read latency, the 99th percentile read latency of the Optane SSDs on the Light test only impresses when compared to the performance of flash-based SSDs in unfavorable conditions like being completely full. Otherwise, the Samsung PM981 performs just as well, and the 960 PRO isn't far behind. The 99th percentile write latency of the Optane SSDs is clearly worse than Samsung's top NVMe SSDs.
The Optane SSD 900p again requires much more energy than most NVMe SSDs, and the larger Optane drive requires significantly more power—three times as much as the most efficient NVMe SSD we've tested.
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nathanddrews - Friday, December 15, 2017 - link
Is there any indication that performance would degrade with a lesser CPU or improve with a faster CPU? Just curious if we should expect CPU bottlenecks from these hyper-speed SSDs.Billy Tallis - Friday, December 15, 2017 - link
Yes, CPU speed can definitely affect latency and consistency and maximum achievable IOPS. Some of those limits were hit with the P4800X testing on a server with lower per-core performance than this consumer testbed.At the moment, my inclination is to leave the consumer test suite single-threaded, because consumer workloads don't actually hit the queue depths necessary to go beyond the I/O capabilities of a single CPU core. I don't care too much if the high QD range on some of the graphs doesn't quite reach the theoretical limit of the drive, because that's not the part of the graph we should be paying attention to. (For consumer drives.)
At low queue depths, interrupt servicing latency can be helped a bit by a faster CPU. But for most consumers, switching from Windows to Linux will do a lot more to help reduce their storage latency. And saving a few more microseconds only matters on Optane; mainstream products won't be this fast for quite a while.
ddrіver - Friday, December 15, 2017 - link
I think I'll have to reevaluate my position on Optane. Seems like a solid product. Guess I misread the signs.ddriver - Friday, December 15, 2017 - link
How can you tell a fake "ddriver" apart? Well, the real one would never mislabel the product hypetane ;)It is what it is, and still nowhere nearly "1000x" better as intel claimed. It has its niche strengths, but those offer no tangible benefit to 99.9999% of the consumers out there. I don't recall ever claiming that it will suck, my claim has always been that it will epically fail to live up to the hype, which testing thoroughly confirms. It is not even 10% of "1000x better". So hypetane it is.
SLC flash can easily match and even bet it in most performance metrics. Unfortunately the industry is not even trying, even mlc is now considered "ultra high end enterprise". Which is understandable, as the workloads that could actually benefit from higher performance are very few and far in between, and for 99% of them using ram is the more applicable and still tremendously better performing solution.
It is definitely not a bad product on its own. And I would not refer to it as "hypetane" if only intel hadn't shamelessly lied about it on such a preposterous scale.
tuxRoller - Friday, December 15, 2017 - link
Interface speeds≠ media speedsWhen will you learn?
Also, still need a reference for those SLC numbers.
LordanSS - Saturday, December 16, 2017 - link
Indeed, Interface speeds are not "media" speeds. I never expected it to work according to Intel's "1000x" claims, but was hoping for a more in-line 20x better from what we currently have, considering first generation product and all.And it doesn't even do that. Sorry, for this one time, I am (partially) siding with ddriver.
lmcd - Saturday, December 16, 2017 - link
20X better overall is entirely unrealistic. Certain attributes are 20X better. That is all you can really expect when so many things (form factor, power usage, interface protocols, physical interface, etc) are retained from the previous generation.LordanSS - Sunday, December 17, 2017 - link
20x is 2% (TWO PERCENT) of what Intel claimed when they disclosed XPoint. It's not realistic?Intel shoul have kept their mouth shut back then, just like Micron has done so until now. If they can't even do 2% of what they claimed, they're the unrealistic ones.
tuxRoller - Sunday, December 17, 2017 - link
Were those claims that Intel made in reference to xpoint the tech, or optane the first gen product?tuxRoller - Saturday, December 16, 2017 - link
I'm not sure why you are quoting media, but you are absolutely welcome to be disappointed.You'll notice I don't care whether anyone thinks Intel over hyped their product only that we still don't know what the actual xpoint (the media, or "tread + xfer + Misc" times, as Handy refers to it) response times look like.
If AT doesn't allow the below link, search for "xpoint presence in slow lane explained" on the register, or Google "Why XPoint SSDs won't meet original speed claims: A guide"
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/09/29/xpoint_pr...