Intel 900p Optane ...WOW

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.
 
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.

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.
 
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.
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.
 
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.

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).
 
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.

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.
 
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.

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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