Intel 3D XPoint SSD Specs: So-So Transfer Speed, Awesome Random I/O

[Megalith]

The specification sheet for the Intel SSD DC P4800X has been released. If you placed any money on Optane crushing read/write speed records, you are going to be poorer. The technology, however, is in no way a disappointment, as 3D XPoint appears to kill it when it comes to I/O operations per second. As someone who tends to manage smaller files across drives, that sounds plenty good to me. I should also point out that Intel’s solution has a warranty covering 7.3 petabytes of writes, while competing solutions may cover only only 0.1PB. I figure that speaks quite a bit on Optane’s endurance.

…this doesn't sound like 1,000 more performance than flash. What gives? The big difference appears to be in latency and the number of I/O operations the Optane drive supports per second. The P4800X can service up to 550,000 read or 500,000 write operations per second. The older Intel SSD can only service 450,000 reads or 175,000 writes per second and falls to just 75,000 writes for the 400GB unit. The Samsung drive clocks in at 380,000 and 360,000 read and write operations per second (falling to 330,000 and 300,000 for the 250GB version). If raw operations per second are what you need, Optane is already looking strong. The latency figures—the time it takes to actually serve a read and write operation—also look good: the Intel flash SSD has a 20-microsecond latency for any read or write operation, whereas the 3D XPoint drive cuts this to below 10 microseconds.

 

[JosiahBradley]

But we were promised an order of magnitude latency decrease somewhere between RAM and NVMe. Also endurance is only twice that of their own SSD for data center. With all the requirements to run these drives why not just buy more RAM or save and get NVMe 8TB drives.

 

[AceGoober]

Excited for the perceived performance and warranty yet the storage capacity is abysmal. I hope capacity will increase over time and exhibits the same performance. Keeping my fingers crossed.

 

[nutzo]

I'd be happy with a slower SSD with a much cheaper $/GB price, something competitive with 2TB or 4TB mechanical drive.

 

[Deleted member 82943]

the latency numbers and durability of the NAND will make this the defacto database drive

 

[Flogger23m]

I'd be happy with a slower SSD with a much cheaper $/GB price, something competitive with 2TB or 4TB mechanical drive.

Agreed. Most days and most tasks will still be bottlenecked by the CPU assuming you have a decent enough SSD. I'd rather have a larger SSD because they're simply faster than HDDs. With games/programs becoming bigger, and files getting larger I'd like to move everything off of HDDs. Certainly helps when viewing large, unedited video files, constant accessing of large files and the like.

 

[drescherjm]

the latency numbers and durability of the NAND will make this the defacto database drive

I would like to see these used in cache applications also.

 

[Galvin]

That durability will make the drive out live you. Thats amazing, but read/write is not impressive at all. Samsung has that beat already with 3d flash.

 

[Deleted member 82943]

Look again. The drive is likely limited by its interface given the latency (or lack therof) of the transfers as well as that random read and write speeds. If this ever became affordable in the mainstream I'll be all over it. Find me a similar drive that has those latency numbers in random writes/ reads workloads I don't think one exists.