SSDs are finally at the point where their costs have fallen
finally at the point where their costs have fallen and their capacities are so high that they are truly a
replacement for the hard drives of yore.
Which raises the question then
What the heck was Intel thinking? Releasing
expensive
58 and
118 gigabyte SSDs for performance
Enthusiasts in the year 2018.. I'm gonna level with you
We're still not sure
But we're gonna walk you through what we do know about the Intel octane SSD 800P
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So just like it's smaller accelerator siblings, The Optane 800P comes in a standard m.2
Form factor, which allows it to work as either a normal storage drive in any machine with NVME or
this is unofficial though in supported systems as an accelerator for your hard drive the
caveat at this time though is that it only does that on your boot drive so as
Enthusiasts around here anyway. We would really like to see more
flexibility in the future for our applications like
Booting off of an SSD like a normal one and then using a large optane module to accelerate
Maybe like a gigantic steam library on a high-capacity
Secondary drive. Of course until isn't marketing the 800P as an accelerator anyway
But that didn't stop us from feeling like we needed to ask
What are these things for them? And their response was kind of baffling they were like well
You know we feel like 58 gigs is big enough for a dedicated boot drive, and I mean
Yeaaaah
Technically you could install Windows 10 on
58 gigs but, I mean you'd have spent a 130$ on a storage solution by that point
that wouldn't even have enough additional space left over to store the hibernation file of
A high-end system with 32 gigs of ram these days.. Now a 118gb is
jObviously quite a bit better
but
even then you're gonna have to be giving me
A LOT of performance to give up
3/4 of the capacity that I would get with a decent NAND based SATA SSD
so
Let's go ahead and fire it up shall we?
So this is it. This is the optane experience, We are booted off our 118 gig drive
get some benchmarks fired up here shall we?
So starting with CrystalDiskMark at a key depth of eight compared to a Samsung 960 Pro
We're getting slightly higher random reads and then significantly inferior random writes
But at Q depth one obtains random read performance is over triple
That's really impressive given that this is closer to what most average users would be experiencing in their day-to-day lives
Moving on to performance test op team triples the speed of our Samsung and also has
significantly lower
Latency. 8 milliseconds is a full frame delay at 120 Hertz where our SATA SSD is over two frames at
60Hz
Adding a file copy in the background our Optain drive maintains its lead, but not by quite as much.
Moving on to Microsoft Word our average scores could optane at just over a
Second lead in load times with excel and powerpoint yielding smaller gains launching from optane though
It should be noted that every configuration is fast enough for normal people who don't launch ten documents at once
Google Chrome launches marginally faster while Adobe Premiere saw just under a second shaved off its load time
Finally and this will be unsurprising if you saw our Optane 900P video, Doom, the only big game
That would comfortably fit on even our larger module was hardly different at all
Okay, so in spite of using only two PCI Express Lanes versus the four for the samsung 960
Pro that we used as our benchmark NVME drive, The optane 800 piece performances as the kids say think "On
Fleek" so maybe the solution then to our capacity woes is
Another one? Let's try running them in raid 0
Alright then, Bippity Boppity
Done
now compared to a single drive
The numbers look pretty good in our synthetic tests with only slight regressions at a key depth of one
Where raid really shines though is in the responsiveness
Check out that latency and then even better
Check out the max latency while we have our file copy running. That's just over one frame at
240 Hertz set what I would consider to be an "unreasonable load" on a boot drive
Unfortunately though we do see some regressions in most of our program launch tests with the notable exception of Adobe premier which
Demonstrates what Intel's been saying all along that optane is not about raw throughput, but more about very low latency
Which is why you won't find how many megabytes per second it does, anywhere on the box.
Bringing us then back to our original question. Maybe you can help us answer it
Who is this for?
What is it for? At a 130 bucks for 58gb and
200 for a 118gb, The pricing is
not exactly competitive
It's too small for real professional work or even mainstream
consumer use and
Raid with all of its trade-offs, honestly isn't a great solution because it doesn't solve the price
As for the performance,
I don't know. Sorry guys. I mean this
This is not like the move from hard drives to SSDs where I was ending up in like
YouTube comments shouting matches with people who didn't get why I was so excited to pay five X for
one-fifth of the capacity or whatever it was
Optane is faster it is
But the way that intel's pitching it
It's not faster in a noticeable way at least not for consumers. The DataCenter is a whole other story, so
We've seen other publications talk about using it as a scratch disk in a workstation or something like that
Optane does have higher write endurance than the NAND flash in traditional SSDs. But then in my mind the
900p with its wider interface and much higher capacities is the product for that
Maybe with Ram pricing being what it is the 800 peak who would make sense as like a cheaper way to expand system memory?
I'm not sure about that one either. It sounds like a driver nightmare
Now in the future as prices fall..
I will happily take my better system responsiveness
But for now I have a hard time recommending paying the extra for this particular product as a boot drive
so the conclusion then is
good technology great
technology
But still looking for a reason why people might want to buy this one
Let us know in the comments if you disagree
It's making of things to disagree about
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