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The Intel Optane SSD 900P 280G Review
- nimos 9y agoI wonder what the relative production cost is for the 3D Xpoint vs NAND. Given the newer state of the technology it seems like there might be more low hanging fruit in terms of performance/cost improvement. If Intel can hit a production cost per GB close to standard NAND it seems like they would be able to absolutely dominate the premium consumer/enterprise SSD market.
- wmf 9y agoThe production cost is probably pretty high: https://www.anandtech.com/show/11454/techinsights-publishes-preliminary-analysis-of-3d-xpoint-memory https://www.anandtech.com/show/11454/techinsights-publishes-...
- dis-sys 9y agoA couple interesting points in the official spec - 1. Write Endurance is amazing, you can keep writing 2.8Tbytes per day every day for 5 years, as a comparison, Intel 750 only allow you to write 70GBytes per day. Such high write endurance does raise an interesting question - why still bother paying for those expensive enterprise NAND SSD. 2. Random IO performance is identical to P4800x, what Intel actually took away from P4800x or is 900P just a slightly different product with a slightly revised spec list. ;) For me, this is the most exciting hardware release in 2017, the price point is just amazing, it is going significantly boost the performance I am going to get from my distributed consensus library which requires fsync for each write.
- montecarl 9y agoIts super exciting for new storage technologies to be released, but at this time it doesn't seem that much better than Samsung's Evo 960, which can be had for much lower prices.
- katastic 9y agoI'm hoping that changes as they improve yields / gain more commercial adoption. This is "Intel" we're talking about. I'm no expert on the industry, but from what I recall Intel is the king of fabs.
- semi-extrinsic 9y agoWell, they've also chased quite a fee geese that haven't provided any golden eggs yet. Like Xeon Phi, which was supposed to be the GPGPU killer for half a decade now. But it's never really been more than temporarily on par with NVidia's offerings.
- katastic 9y ago"Intel's greatest invention... was AMD." ;D
- wmf 9y agoIntel is also king of margins. Considering that NAND is 4x the density of XPoint I wouldn't expect it to get much cheaper.
- thriftwy 9y agoIt is aeons better if they deliver: * High Read And Write Performance At Small Capacity Points * High Performance Maintained As The Drive Fills * Heavy Workloads That Cause Drive Wear And Require High Endurance Because SSD fail all three: They require huge blocks to be wiped if you want to write anything, they grind to halt once you fill past 50%, and they eventually degrade. From what I've seen in charts, they deliver.
- ntrepid8 9y agoI think I need to get one of these.
- saas_co_de 9y agovery disappointing compared to the original marketing promises.
- polskibus 9y agoI wish benchmarks included C++, C#, js (gulp? Webpack?) and Java builds so that programmers knew whether an upgrade is worth it.
- merkaloid 9y agoLooks like its almost completely worthless for consumers. Real world performance is the same as NVMe drives yet at much higher $/GB
- deno 9y ago> We've never experienced a system that felt as fast and responsive as our workstation with the 900P as the operating system drive, and that’s largely due to the explosive random read performance at low queue depths. At QD1, the 900P is nearly 4x faster than the Samsung 960 EVO 1TB Are we reading the same article?
- tetraodonpuffer 9y agoI would expect anybody working with DAWs and sample libraries (extremely low latency random read performance needed, meaning every note playing can be a sample anywhere on your drive) would jump at these, both pros and amateurs.
- dharma1 9y agoI've been thinking about moving my Kontakt libraries to a fast SSD. Would you see a difference noticeable between this and Samsung 960 for that purpose?
- tetraodonpuffer 9y agoI'm assuming it depends from the size of your template (i.e. how many samples at a time you're using). For not huge templates you can already run kontakt fully purged off the SSD, but I would assume with this the limiter would be pretty much entirely the CPU... still I don't know of anybody having done any DAW tests with XPoint and large sample libraries (say, Spitfire etc.), would be interesting to see what kind of polyphony a high core CPU with this would be able to achieve...
- dharma1 9y agoSome stress testing with older SSD's here - https://vi-control.net/community/threads/performance-to-be-expected-from-ssd-for-spitfire.58693/ https://vi-control.net/community/threads/performance-to-be-e... I use Spitfire stuff, mainly Albion, but the voice requirements these guys have is on another level. The Optane speedup would certainly mean more voices, and perhaps remove the need to have separate SSD's for each large kontakt library?
- bkeroack 9y ago500k sustained random IOPS from a single device is remarkable. To put that in perspective, 500k PIOPS in AWS would cost you $32,500/month (https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/pricing/). This drive looks like it would be amazing for database workloads, for example.
- yayana 9y agoI like to use my AWS ops to send SMS messages so I can really get the most out of my service providers.
- topspin 9y agoI remember when the rule of thumb for big storage arrays was "100 IOPS per disk." It's still only that with common desktop disks and only 200-ish for enterprise SAS disks. This device provides the equivalent of 2500-5000 disks of IOPS. Latency, particularly write latency, should be better than flash as well. The price isn't too bad really; a Samsung 960 PRO M.2 1TB is $600 for a little more than twice the storage. It's still early days for 3d xpoint; Intel and Micron will build on this. Exciting stuff.
- phonon 9y agoAn EC2 I3 has up to 3.3 million IOPS. https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2017/02/now-available-amazon-ec2-i3-instances-next-generation-storage-optimized-high-i-o-instances/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2017/02/now-avail...
- bkeroack 9y ago"Up to". Also we don't know how many underlying SSD devices there are, which is my point. This is a single drive that supports radically more sustained random IOPS than we've ever seen, at a very low price point compared to comparable solutions.
- phonon 9y agoThat's with eight 1.9 TB devices. You can scale it down, of course. Anyway, the point is you do not need to spend anywhere near $32,500/m to get that kind of performance from AWS. (As long as you don't mind using non-EBS storage.) In this case, an i3.16xlarge is $27,856 per YEAR (if paid upfront).
- bitL 9y agoRemind you, transfer throughput improvements from HDD to SDD had limited effect on perceived performance; the reduction in latency was what made SSDs magical (compare normal USB stick to USB sticks with SSD controller). Optane when they manage to get it to original promise and optimize software around it, should yield a similar latency reduction, making them feel much snappier than current SSDs, though throughput-wise they might not be so shiny.
- the_jeremy 9y agoI didn't see in the article anything talking explicitly about latency reduction. I know SSDs have much lower latency than HDDs; could you expand / provide stats on how 3D Xpoint's latency compares to SSD?
- mozumder 9y agoI have an Intel i750 NVMe SSD. It has about a 60 microsecond latency. This device is supposed to be on the order of 10 microsecond. The only people that would notice that are people running database servers serving hundreds of thousands of users.
- the_jeremy 9y agoDoes anyone know if there are stats on things like Windows boot times / game load times? I've seen graphs that show boot times comparable between average SSDs and the 960 EVO; is this something an average home user could feel an improvement with?
- jjaredsimpson 9y agoBooting Windows and loading games is full of large sequential reads using high queue depths. This is something ssd controller can optimize well already. Average consumers don't need this. Enthusiast gamers don't need this. This is enterprise hardware rebranded for consumers.
- tigershark 9y agoNo, it's exactly the opposite. Enterprise workload with a big queue depth is the realm of SSD. Xpoint brings the same or much better speed (use case dependent) even to the consumers that need for 99% of the time a queue depth between 1 and 4.
- fhood 9y agoIs this really a product for "enthusiasts"? It seems to me like this would be far more valuable for servers and the like than "esports gamers".
- wmf 9y agoNote that "enthusiast" is kind of a euphemism for people with more money than sense who buy overpowered hardware they don't need.
- iClaudiusX 9y agoThe niche for this device is high random read performance in workloads where the dataset is too large to fit in RAM, for a significant price premium. Random write and sequential read/write performance is poor value compared to cheaper and higher capacity NVME ssds from Samsung. The one standout feature apparently is that performance is reliable and not subject to GC stalls or degradation as the drive fills up.
- vbezhenar 9y agoPrice is truly amazing. I expected 280GB to cost around $700. This thing is going into my next PC.