Optane 905P - Still Worth it as an OS Drive?

[Zarathustra[H]]

And since many will argue that the elevated price is never worth it, let me define what I mean by "worth it".

One of the best consumer drives on the market currently is the Samsung 980 Pro.

By worth it, I mean, if I am going to pay the premium for a 960GB Optane 905p drive, which is going to cost about 3x more than a 1TB Samung 980 Pro, am I going to get anything for it? We all know incremental performance at the top end does not scale linearly. What I am interested in knowing is, if I want excellent performance at any price, is a 905p going to be better than 980 Pro?

The 980 Pro will have the benefit of higher sustained transfer speeds on large sequential files, in part due to its parallelism and in part due to the Gen 4 support.

The 905p - on the other hand, while limited to Gen 3, and with lower sequential transfer speeds at least used to have the killer low latency and high IOPS performance that was great for things like OS drives.

If money weren't an issue, do you think one would be better off with a 980 Pro or a 905p as a boot/OS drive.

Or maybe even something else?

I'd appreciate peoples thoughts.

 

[daglesj]

Whilst both have amazing things going for them at the end of the day if you had two machines with them in them I doubt 99 times out of 100 you'd know which was which.

With super fast storage it's been a law of diminishing returns for day to day usage once we broke the 500MBps barrier in my opinion. Obviously you can afford it but maybe do what I did* instead, just buy the 108GB version and us that as a super low latency cache drive or something.

That or think of something more fun and noticeable you'd enjoy with the cash?




* I just used the 16/32 Optanes for that.

 

[Grebuloner]

No regrets on my 900p as OS and primary program drive. It spends more time on the BIOS screen than loading Windows/getting to the desktop. Is it better than the 980 at that? Can't say. I can only compare to the couple regular NVMe drives I have in other systems, but they don't have to load as much on startup and have slower CPUs, too. But I can say that my Windows updates go very quickly compared to the other systems; the random write dominance really shines, there.

The reliability will be better all around, I think, being essentially a rebadged enterprise drive, not that the endurance difference will be particularly relevant to most people. Someday when 4800X/5800X drives go for extra cheap on the 'bay, I'll buy them up like we did with the fusionIOs for boinc/other PCs since I'll be able to easily move them into newer systems for years.

 

[cpufrost]

Really depends on how much capacity and desktop load. I can tell you this...running Hyper-V the 1.5TB version absolutely smoked any other nvme drives used. They are expensive but there's a reason for it. If used for what intended for they are worth every penny, period. For casual desktop beater/gaming just toss in any Phison nvme (except QLC) and go. In our case with VM checkpoints, the other drives' performance tanked when their SLC cache was filled. What would be drool worthy is 100TB of SLC with a lot of lanes providing similar bandwidth as DDR3!

 

[Patton43]

I liked mine so much I bought a 5800x to replace it. The consumer drives were basically rebadged enterprise drives. I love the reliability, the insane low latency and never having to worry about endurance. In my use case the drive will have some sort of physical failure before the media wears out. It is a damn shame that this technology never reached the economy of scale needed to be profitable in the consumer or enthusiast space.

The latency is unmatched by anything short of ram drives. I have always been a snob for latency, buying 10k+ RPM HDD's for my OS drive back in the day and putting up with the jet engine in my case. Too many people get hung up on big sequential numbers. For boot/OS drives latency is king.

I have never had such a smooth and responsive windows experience than on optane drives. When not working I have my top few steam games and MMO clients on the optane drive. I can swap them out guilt free all the time and never worry about wearing it out.

As with anything, the value proposition is for everyone to decide for themselves.

 

[ChosenUno]

If you're not using it to make money it's not worth it. If you're actually doing stuff that leverages the drive it'll be a huge deal, otherwise not so much.

Any PCI-E NVME SSD will be smoking fast. The better IOPS and access latency won't be felt with just normal desktop OS workloads, or even gaming, as FWIW MS and game developers optimize things to lean heavily on sequential reads.

 

[Monstieur]

I too upgraded from an Optane 900p 280 GB to an Optane DC P5800X 800 GB. Unfortunately the real-world performance of the P5800X in games and on the desktop is identical to Phison E18 PCIe 4.0 drives like the FireCuda 530 and Corsair MP600 XT.

The 900p destroyed my old Samsung 950 Pro in performance even on the desktop. Sadly that's not the case anymore with the latest SSDs. The difference is too small to warrant the expense.

I'm planning to move the P5800X to my TrueNAS server as an SLOG + L2ARC device and use the FireCuda 530 as my boot drive.

 

[daglesj]

Yeah I'm getting 6770MBps out of a £120 drive in my laptop alone! Things move on.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Yeah I'm getting 6770MBps out of a £120 drive in my laptop alone! Things move on.

They do, but sequential performance isn't everything.

In fact, when it comes to responsiveness and load and boot times it is a much less important performance metric than other measures of responsiveness, like small random reads/writes and IOPS, and that is one area in which Optane has traditionally excelled compared to other SSD's.

 

[Furious_Styles]

They do, but sequential performance isn't everything.

In fact, when it comes to responsiveness and load and boot times it is a much less important performance metric than other measures of responsiveness, like small random reads/writes and IOPS, and that is one area in which Optane has traditionally excelled compared to other SSD's.

Does anyone care about boot times anymore? I mean even on a SSD they're extremely fast.

 

[eduncan911]

A little late to this convo...

So, I have an 970 Pro in my laptop, and it's been nothing special other than a few noticeable coding things that are pretty fast from time to time compared to my old SSD desktop. Honestly, I'm kind of pissed at it since it corrupted my last linux install. I had an eGPU and on Linux and a laptop constantly being plugged in and unplugged, an eGPU is not a good thing (hard lockups/freezes, completely instant power offs, etc). The 970 Pro took about 1.5 years of that, until Linux finally couldn't recover. Honestly though, I did beat the crap out of it - writing/importing GBs of DBs, and instant power off.

But it's a night and day difference when compared to my Optane 905P desktop. It's hard to compare exactly though... M.2 NVMe 970 Pro in a 6-core 8th-gen 35W Xeon laptop w/2666 ECC ram versus an AMD 5950X @ 5Ghz all cores, 128GB 3200Mhz ECC - oh and an 905P 960GB. It's a new machine so I'll need to expand storage sometime (hopefully a 2nd 905P 960GB). Compilations are near instant - which I am sure the 32T destroys over the Spectra-mitigated crippled 8th Gen 6-core 35W. Finally!! I've been asking for years why are things so slow even with SSDs.

For Intel 900P/905P, look to eBay for used ones. With such an massively insane endurance, you're rarely ever find one with less than 97% remaining.

I've been picking up 480GB versions for around $220/$250 and 960GB versions for ~$520. You have to sit and wait for the deals. Hell, a brand new U.2 905P 960GB just sold for $540. I was going to get it; but, I have too many of these right now... The most worn one I have is 98% remaining, which is about 8.5 PB (yeah, I'll never hit that). Oh, and they all still have warranty! (Intel confirmed it on all of them)

So yeah, the cost is worth it to me over a 980 Pro.

This is the time to setup alerts and subscribe, since they just went EOL.

And now for my rant on SSDs. It took me nearly 10 years to figure out how I was killing SSDs: I write too damn much. Between TBs of data imports and ansible for setting up servers (churning 1/2 dozen VMs in integration tests, or rather a dozen containers created and destroyed), and the TBs of movies and TVs I used to copy on a weekly based for my 4 hour round-trip train commute (daily!), I was just writing so much.

These days, I just shoot for high endurance enterprise drives (SSDs, NVMe in U.2, M.2, and HHHL) and have yet to ever have an issue again. Hence, why my desktop has 905Ps in it (and each server, as my ZFS ZIL and I'm about to enable Persistent L2ARC on the remaining space of the Optane drive!).


I just wish I could find an M.2 2280 Enterprise drive with super-caps... I'm spoiled now with Ceph and ZFS, and the 970 Pro is the only flash drive I own that doesn't have super-caps (and I have nearly 30 SSDs and NVMe).

EDIT: Ignore my signature, I haven't posted in nearly a 1/2 decade. It's outdated...