4 ms·

Pretty impressive performance, but Optane 905P is 3 years old and still handily leads in nearly every benchmark (except power). Too bad Intel pulled out of the

Pretty impressive performance, but Optane 905P is 3 years old and still handily leads in nearly every benchmark (except power). Too bad Intel pulled out of the consumer drive segment [1], so I'm not even sure why Anandtech bothered to include those benchmarks. [1] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-kills-off-all-optane-only-ssds-for-consumers-no-replacements-planned https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-kills-off-all-optane...

Godel_unicode 6y ago
Isn't optane something like 2x-3x the price for marginal gains and worse write latency?
- wtallis 6y ago
  More like 6-8x the price. I don't think I ever saw the Optane SSDs get below $1/GB, and the SN850 is $0.20/GB.
  - ComputerGuru 6y ago
    The 905p in 480 GB is supposed to be around $600 making it only 3x the price, but good look finding it. Intel doesn’t even MSRP it any more, although it’s still an active product.
    - Dylan16807 6y ago
      3x the price of the 1TB model. 5x the price of the 500GB model.
- modzu 6y ago
  no. optane is something like twice the speed of the 850 at random read. have it as a boot drive and ive been living in the future. i mean its great something like the 850 is as cheap as it is. but i can barely tell the difference between that and any sata drive. to be fair, it depends on your use case. look at real world benchmarks measured in human timescales (actual honest comparisons are rare in these reviews, because then this stuff wouldnt sell affiliate links). i cant help but feel consumer pc parts are merely for videogame consoles. the ssd and ddr speed crap, lack of ecc, etc.. building machines with this stuff is almost like a videogame itself -- my ssd scored 1,937,533 points on synthscore 3.5! (like, it saves 9.5 minutes of my life over 365 days compared to a samsung lolz)
  - nine_k 6y ago
    M.2 drives are small and usually don't require a cable and a bay. It is important in compact builds. Funnily enough, recent AMD CPUs for the consumer segment support ECC out of the box. But you need a right motherboard, of course. This is a welcome streak of sanity in the world where consumer PCs have 32GB RAM.
    - my123 6y ago
      > recent AMD CPUs for the consumer segment CPUs yes, but not APUs. This matters especially for SFF builds where you might not want a dGPU. For those, you specifically have to hunt for Ryzen Pro APUs which do have ECC support.
    - modzu 6y ago
      i can only find one single motherboard that supports ecc for the new ryzen. im glad amd isn't crippling it, but for all intents and purposes the support still isn't there
      - Godel_unicode 6y ago
        You might want to check out the ASRock rack X470D4U, as long as you're running either a desktop CPU or a pro APU. If you're specifically referring to a non-pro APU then yes you're likely out of luck.
- vbezhenar 6y ago
  For low queue-depths benchmarks gains are not marginal. It's 10x faster. And write durability gains are not marginal either, it's 30x more (compared to Samsung 980 Pro). An issue is that even SATA SSD is fast enough for most users and write durability of even modern QLC disks is good enough.
  - Godel_unicode 6y ago
    >...10x faster. That's absolutely not true. I encourage you to re-read the article. The very specific case of qd=1 random reads are 4x (less than half what you suggest) faster, however in that scenario you probably care about latency more than speed. Also, qd=1 random reads are uncommon in disc-bound real-world scenarios. There are plenty of benchmarks which have the optane close or losing, and as benchmarks become less synthetic the gaps largely disappear. The gains are marginal where they exist, and the price is outrageous. The problem is that optane is an appealing idea which simply failed to pan out.
sbierwagen 6y ago
For others wondering about price: 905P is $598 for 480GB. SN850 is $119 for 500GB.
ComputerGuru 6y ago
I had high hopes for Samsung Z SSD, which was supposed to be their competitor to Intel’s Optane. It hasn’t really gone anywhere and hasn’t placed Optane under any price pressure.
gfody 6y ago
curiously this new drive stomps the optane on random writes - though the optane is still king of random reads.
- ericpauley 6y ago
  That makes sense, since the underlying storage is probably log-structured/lazy write, whereas there is no way to perform reads other than actually reading the data. So reads would probably be a harder workload to optimize for than writes.
  - gfody 6y ago
    that does make sense but still surprising that it holds up in the sustained benchmark as well - that must be a big cache and I don't see any capacitors on the pcb
    - wtallis 6y ago
      It doesn't need capacitors for the data written out to the SLC cache (storing one pit per NAND flash memory cell rather than three), which is the only cache that's actually multiple GB in size. The volatile RAM caches on consumer drives tend to be pretty small, and data is resident in them just long enough to batch together enough writes to provide good throughput.
    - vbezhenar 6y ago
      You need to write full amount of disk size to get the "real" write speed and to eliminate any kind of caching. Though it's not clear whether that would be a useful metric, most users are not going to fill their disks every day.
- ComputerGuru 6y ago
  Random write latency can be hidden behind large caches: regardless of where the data should go, it can all be put in the same fast (persisted) cache. But reads could come from anywhere and you can’t cache that. Reads were always traditionally faster than writes but large SLC and DRAM caches have turned that on its head.
jsheard 6y ago
Optanes future is looking even more uncertain now, Micron was the only manufacturer of Optane memory and they just announced they're abandoning the technology https://www.anandtech.com/show/16558/micron-abandons-3d-xpoint-memory-technology https://www.anandtech.com/show/16558/micron-abandons-3d-xpoi... Intel will need to bring Optane production in-house or get another partner on board if they're going to continue with it
- twotwotwo 6y ago
  And Micron knows more than anyone but Intel about it--capital costs, yields, directions for improvement, etc. Owning the sole fab for fast NVRAM and trying to get out suggests things aren't great. I think the slot for a new NVRAM has gotten harder to fill. You almost have to sell it on read latency alone, because throughput (GB/s, parallel IOPS) is already high and scales with RAID, and most folks are either OK with Flash write latency or OK hiding it with (possibly powerloss-protected) DRAM buffers. In a way maybe the easiest pitch is "instead of doubling your RAM, add 3x as much of this stuff," because relatively small caches can show real gains, so there isn't so much pressure on cost/GB. But it still has to be way cheaper than RAM and more performant than 'just' a great SSD. And if the pitch is "replace your whole Flash array with this," beefy boxes tend to have TBs of Flash and most customers will only pay so much for improved latency, which puts a cap on the cost/GB of a commercially viable alternative SSD. Even the fastest Flash SSDs don't seem that popular! A breakthrough could always happen, but I wonder if short-term we're looking more at progress through tweaks to the existing technologies rather than a leap to anything vastly different. If so that's largely because the current tech is pretty good, which is not the worst problem to have.

Godel_unicode 6y ago

Isn't optane something like 2x-3x the price for marginal gains and worse write latency?

wtallis 6y ago
More like 6-8x the price. I don't think I ever saw the Optane SSDs get below $1/GB, and the SN850 is $0.20/GB.
- ComputerGuru 6y ago
  The 905p in 480 GB is supposed to be around $600 making it only 3x the price, but good look finding it. Intel doesn’t even MSRP it any more, although it’s still an active product.
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    3x the price of the 1TB model. 5x the price of the 500GB model.
modzu 6y ago
no. optane is something like twice the speed of the 850 at random read. have it as a boot drive and ive been living in the future. i mean its great something like the 850 is as cheap as it is. but i can barely tell the difference between that and any sata drive. to be fair, it depends on your use case. look at real world benchmarks measured in human timescales (actual honest comparisons are rare in these reviews, because then this stuff wouldnt sell affiliate links). i cant help but feel consumer pc parts are merely for videogame consoles. the ssd and ddr speed crap, lack of ecc, etc.. building machines with this stuff is almost like a videogame itself -- my ssd scored 1,937,533 points on synthscore 3.5! (like, it saves 9.5 minutes of my life over 365 days compared to a samsung lolz)
- nine_k 6y ago
  M.2 drives are small and usually don't require a cable and a bay. It is important in compact builds. Funnily enough, recent AMD CPUs for the consumer segment support ECC out of the box. But you need a right motherboard, of course. This is a welcome streak of sanity in the world where consumer PCs have 32GB RAM.
  - my123 6y ago
    > recent AMD CPUs for the consumer segment CPUs yes, but not APUs. This matters especially for SFF builds where you might not want a dGPU. For those, you specifically have to hunt for Ryzen Pro APUs which do have ECC support.
  - modzu 6y ago
    i can only find one single motherboard that supports ecc for the new ryzen. im glad amd isn't crippling it, but for all intents and purposes the support still isn't there
    - Godel_unicode 6y ago
      You might want to check out the ASRock rack X470D4U, as long as you're running either a desktop CPU or a pro APU. If you're specifically referring to a non-pro APU then yes you're likely out of luck.
vbezhenar 6y ago
For low queue-depths benchmarks gains are not marginal. It's 10x faster. And write durability gains are not marginal either, it's 30x more (compared to Samsung 980 Pro). An issue is that even SATA SSD is fast enough for most users and write durability of even modern QLC disks is good enough.
- Godel_unicode 6y ago
  >...10x faster. That's absolutely not true. I encourage you to re-read the article. The very specific case of qd=1 random reads are 4x (less than half what you suggest) faster, however in that scenario you probably care about latency more than speed. Also, qd=1 random reads are uncommon in disc-bound real-world scenarios. There are plenty of benchmarks which have the optane close or losing, and as benchmarks become less synthetic the gaps largely disappear. The gains are marginal where they exist, and the price is outrageous. The problem is that optane is an appealing idea which simply failed to pan out.

sbierwagen 6y ago

For others wondering about price: 905P is $598 for 480GB. SN850 is $119 for 500GB.

ComputerGuru 6y ago

I had high hopes for Samsung Z SSD, which was supposed to be their competitor to Intel’s Optane. It hasn’t really gone anywhere and hasn’t placed Optane under any price pressure.

gfody 6y ago

curiously this new drive stomps the optane on random writes - though the optane is still king of random reads.

ericpauley 6y ago
That makes sense, since the underlying storage is probably log-structured/lazy write, whereas there is no way to perform reads other than actually reading the data. So reads would probably be a harder workload to optimize for than writes.
- gfody 6y ago
  that does make sense but still surprising that it holds up in the sustained benchmark as well - that must be a big cache and I don't see any capacitors on the pcb
  - wtallis 6y ago
    It doesn't need capacitors for the data written out to the SLC cache (storing one pit per NAND flash memory cell rather than three), which is the only cache that's actually multiple GB in size. The volatile RAM caches on consumer drives tend to be pretty small, and data is resident in them just long enough to batch together enough writes to provide good throughput.
  - vbezhenar 6y ago
    You need to write full amount of disk size to get the "real" write speed and to eliminate any kind of caching. Though it's not clear whether that would be a useful metric, most users are not going to fill their disks every day.
ComputerGuru 6y ago
Random write latency can be hidden behind large caches: regardless of where the data should go, it can all be put in the same fast (persisted) cache. But reads could come from anywhere and you can’t cache that. Reads were always traditionally faster than writes but large SLC and DRAM caches have turned that on its head.

jsheard 6y ago

Optanes future is looking even more uncertain now, Micron was the only manufacturer of Optane memory and they just announced they're abandoning the technology https://www.anandtech.com/show/16558/micron-abandons-3d-xpoint-memory-technology https://www.anandtech.com/show/16558/micron-abandons-3d-xpoi... Intel will need to bring Optane production in-house or get another partner on board if they're going to continue with it

twotwotwo 6y ago
And Micron knows more than anyone but Intel about it--capital costs, yields, directions for improvement, etc. Owning the sole fab for fast NVRAM and trying to get out suggests things aren't great. I think the slot for a new NVRAM has gotten harder to fill. You almost have to sell it on read latency alone, because throughput (GB/s, parallel IOPS) is already high and scales with RAID, and most folks are either OK with Flash write latency or OK hiding it with (possibly powerloss-protected) DRAM buffers. In a way maybe the easiest pitch is "instead of doubling your RAM, add 3x as much of this stuff," because relatively small caches can show real gains, so there isn't so much pressure on cost/GB. But it still has to be way cheaper than RAM and more performant than 'just' a great SSD. And if the pitch is "replace your whole Flash array with this," beefy boxes tend to have TBs of Flash and most customers will only pay so much for improved latency, which puts a cap on the cost/GB of a commercially viable alternative SSD. Even the fastest Flash SSDs don't seem that popular! A breakthrough could always happen, but I wonder if short-term we're looking more at progress through tweaks to the existing technologies rather than a leap to anything vastly different. If so that's largely because the current tech is pretty good, which is not the worst problem to have.