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Intel 900p Optane ...WOW

Every SSD improvement has been very small until Optane. No other flash solution has offered low-QD random reads anywhere near where Optane plays at. Truly a huge step in flash evolution. NVMe was great evolution for sequential performance.
 
Brahmzy said:
a huge step
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I'd dare say Gargantuan! Godzilla-esque! Never before had we a new hard drive technology that was faster than its predecessors! Rejoice ye faithless!

In all seriousness, and again, its performance granted and notwithstanding? I'll buy the non-Intel equivalent in 6 months; at about..half the price; oh, and without the asterisks ^^
 
Equivalent in 6 months for half price? Good luck with that! XPoint is XPoint. Do some research ye ignoramous!
 
Brahmzy said:
Equivalent in 6 months for half price? Good luck with that! XPoint is XPoint. Do some research ye ignoramous!
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I thought Micron was getting ready to put out their own branded version of XPoint drives. They were a partner with Intel in their development. Hopefully if they start selling them we could see some better prices.
 
Half price in 6 months is simply unrealistic, whatever way you cut it, lol. Samsung already blew their load with the 970s and they were just a very minor refresh. We won't see anything out of them for another year-ish.
 
X-Point is kinda cool now for a real fast SSD, but it could evolve into something really game changing. That and some of the other promising ultra-fast NVM techs could actually change how systems (HW and OS) are fundamentally designed.

Things are what they are because of entrenched heirarchies of speed/cost tiers. If something blurs or changes those lines, Things Get Interesting.

I look forward to Things Getting Interesting.
 
Wait til we get into shared memory computing. Holy crap.
Flips everything we know upside down.
 
Brahmzy said:
Wait til we get into shared memory computing. Holy crap.
Flips everything we know upside down.
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I've thought about this briefly- and aside from being able to essentially 'sleep' the system with the power off and then have it come instantly back, I don't see much of an innovation here. And I agree that it is an innovation that will be leveraged, just not sure how it will 'flip everything we know upside down' ;).
 
IdiotInCharge said:
I've thought about this briefly- and aside from being able to essentially 'sleep' the system with the power off and then have it come instantly back, I don't see much of an innovation here. And I agree that it is an innovation that will be leveraged, just not sure how it will 'flip everything we know upside down' ;).
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Because of the pros and cons of potentially having everything in a unified address space, and an elimination of data movement between previously separate layers. You wouldn't "load" a file anymore. You just read the data as it's already directly visible by the processor. It changes the bookkeeping problems quite a bit - which is why it may basically never happen writ large, but may in specialized/constrained cases like DB servers and smartphones.
 
zerogg said:
I thought Micron was getting ready to put out their own branded version of XPoint drives. They were a partner with Intel in their development. Hopefully if they start selling them we could see some better prices.
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Micron is calling their version "QuantX", but they haven't announced much about it, or shipped any products. Also, Micron and Intel recently announced an end to their joint venture for NAND flash, but apparently the joint venture for 3D Xpoint is still going on.
 
Keljian said:
Rubbish - you're always CPU bound. MakeMKV will fill a portion of memory as a buffer, then slowly feed that as the processor chugs through the conversion/compression process. Your speed bottleneck isn't storage. Memory latency will make a little difference though.
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I figured MakeMKV was limited by the speed at which my BluRay drive spins.
 
Keljian said:
Bit of an update 950pro (2gb) using the 32gb optane as L2 with primocache, block size in primo set to 4k - new heatsink on the 950 pro.
View attachment 77504

No cache 950 pro (w/heatsink)
View attachment 77505

Results speak for themselves
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I've always wanted an Optane for some reason. I think the theory is neat.

Looks like I could possibly justify one for my 960 Evo, based on your results.

How easy is the software to set up and tweak? I have multiple drives I'd like to try it on. Will that be an issue?
 
Finally built a new system for the wife, and used one of those 900p 280gb cards that was on sale when I picked it up last year. Was able to sell the star citizen code and bring the cost of the drive to around 220$ from memory.
The optane drive really does make for a snappy system drive, it is noticeable vs my 960 pro.
Its a shame Intel wasn't more aggressive with the pricing on these, as these are so uncommon I assume they were a failure in the consumer market.
It's not clear to me if they plan on releasing another gen of optane ssds or if they will stick to optane memory, as that seems what they are targeting now.
 
zerogg said:
Its a shame Intel wasn't more aggressive with the pricing on these, as these are so uncommon I assume they were a failure in the consumer market.
It's not clear to me if they plan on releasing another gen of optane ssds or if they will stick to optane memory, as that seems what they are targeting now.
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As 'nice' as they are, they're just not very marketable to consumers.

What Intel is investing in, and where they're killing it, is in QLC, which is amazing- for the low write intensity workloads of most consumers, QLC rocks, and Intel's M.2 NVMe 660p drives are the price / performance king.


For Optane, while Intel is obviously going to continue pushing the DIMM angle, we should expect them to turn back to the PCIe and M.2 cards in addition to the U.2 drives once they get the controllers properly shrunk, and IIRC they do have a 'hybrid' drive in the pipe that combines Optane with QLC that might work pretty well for desktop use cases.
 
IdiotInCharge said:
That's the plan. I'd love to see one with say 64GB of Optane and 4TB of QLC- I'd pay ~US$450 for that. That's reaching 'who cares' levels of capacity and performance for a desktop user.
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At that price, I can get rid of my 4 TB HDD, and it becomes almost a no-brainer. At say $300, I would order as soon as I saw the pricing.
 
x509 said:
At that price, I can get rid of my 4 TB HDD, and it becomes almost a no-brainer. At say $300, I would order as soon as I saw the pricing.
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I'm definitely waiting for thorough analyises. Intel has had some stinkers and the idea of using different flash types for caching, not just the same TLC or QLC as the rest of the drive provisioned as SLC or MLC for cache, needs to be tested out. I'm not interested in bipolar SSHD-like performance, it needs to be seemless for power users.

On the flip side, I'm quite certain that Intel can do that, if that is indeed the performance level they are developing for. And as cheap as they've gotten their QLC drives to at retail, they're likely to be able to really put pressure on Samsung all around.
 
One application I have found perfect for the old SSHD is in DVR boxes for the TV. I slapped one in and after a couple of reboots the system was much faster from sleep and full power ups. Very noticeable over the old standard HDD.

Anyway back to Optane...
 
Well to me the optane drive actually has value to its hype vs standard NAND nvme drives.

My nvme ssd is no faster in practical use vs my sata ssd 850 pro it replaced. It also slows down system shutdown and reboots. I expect the only noticeable performance benefit I will see is in swapfile usage. I brought the drive as it was a cheaper option than buying a new board to get fixed SATA ports (board has damaged SATA ports now).
 
PhaseNoise said:
The benchmark I would like, and suspect will never materialize because of its eccentricity (and specificity to my needs), is a Chromium compile on an Optane vs. a solid traditional SSD. That's not actually what I work on, but it is reasonably comparable in size and scope.
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Any luck getting this benchmark? For Linux + AMD users, I wonder how useful an Optane would even be... Versus just more RAM. I'm thinking for compiling & building docker images & overall workstation multitasking and VM use. Currently use regular SSDs in raidz2.
 
P1x3L said:
Any luck getting this benchmark? For Linux + AMD users, I wonder how useful an Optane would even be... Versus just more RAM. I'm thinking for compiling & building docker images & overall workstation multitasking and VM use. Currently use regular SSDs in raidz2.
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Haven't looked around much, I was kinda expecting new Optane models at some point and was going to look more seriously then. The optane news pipe has been a bit quiet.

Phoronix does some similar benchmarks, but every time I looked their focus was the CPU and not storage. Anandtech does many big benches of the SSDs, but does blends of things which I am not sure are representative of this use case.

Vs RAM, it really depends I think. RAM is good for bursty tasks, where the writes are dumped to the cache but can then commit in the background before the next burst. Without pauses like that, you just degrade to sustained write performance and RAM doesn't really help that much (as far as I/O is concerned at least).
I suspect optane would be fantastic for VMs. It excels at low queue depth scattered reads - which you would have in a multi-user case.
 
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