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  • ddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    I got myself a bucked of salt. The necessary requirement to swallow that Houdini "2.7x better" claim from the launch PR.

    I've been rendering stuff since the days of 3d max for frigging DOS. And I am yet to experience a scenario where CPU load is not in the 99% range.

    Having a rendering job that cannot feed the CPU to above 10% load with the insanely fast 960 pro has got to be an unprecedented case of cooked-up benchmark in human history.
  • extide - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    Did you read the article? It pretty clearly explains how they got that result, and it makes sense.
  • ddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    Oh yeah, I get it. Hypetane is a synthetic beast. Which allows to showcase said advantage as long as you focus on it in a carefully devised and completely detached from real-world usage workload.

    Don't get me wrong. It is good that hypetane is now available in capacities that actually allow to use it. And if endurance turns out to be tangibly better than nand, I might actually buy it. Low queue depth performance is good, especially random read, which may not be of that much practical use to most of the people out there, but I could make good use of that.

    But it will remain "hypetane" even after I go and buy it. Because intel said "1000 times better", and it is not even 10 times better. A zero on its own might be nothing, but two zeroes after a positive number make quite a lot of difference.
  • ddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    "no other alternative nonvolatile memory technology is close to being ready to challenge 3D XPoint"

    Except for SLC, which was so good it was immediately abandoned once inferior and more profit friendly NAND implementations were available.

    A SLC based product coupled with MRAM cache will easily humiliate hypetane in its few strong aspects.

    Too bad NAND drives are now moving to TLC and QLC, even MLC is heading in the "luxury item" category. Too bad because 3D SLC has tremendous potential. Let's see if it gets realized.
  • extide - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    How would that work. SLC is slower than Optane, can't be written at a block level, needs trash collection, etc. Then you cache it with a technology similar to Optane? Why not just build a drive with all MRAM, oh yeah, too expensive. Looks like Optane wins.
  • ddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    Nope, SLC is actually faster. Look it up.

    And what it cannot do is write at the bit level. Which is not really a big deal. Even CPUs cannot address RAM at bellow a byte, if you want single bit operations, you have to use bitwise operators. Writing at a higher level is actually very efficient, because it reduces overhead. If single bit addressing was important, that's who computers would work.

    Furthermore, single bit writes produce a significant challenge when tracking wear levels. Hypetane still wears out, you know... It will be tremendously harder to accurately track wear at bit level, and I am abot 99.999999% sure it is not how intel does it, meaning that a lot of that supposed extra endurance will be forfeited by managing wear at a coarsely grained level. They won't be managing that at bit level, the overhead will be tremendous and will completely diminish potential advantages.

    The MRAM cache will reduce a lot of write amplification and garbage collection.

    It also looks like 3d SLC has about 3 times the density of the chips intel is currently using for hypetane.

    "Why not just build a drive with all MRAM" - density is too low. Which is also why we use RAM for working memory, I mean volatility can easily be solved by say adding a RTG battery to a DRAM drive, giving it effectively about a century of continuous, uninterrupted power. It is doable, but then again, redundant, and while it is true that the industry does a lot of pointless things nowadays, the only ones that qualify are those with a desirable usability to profitability ratio, and a RTG DRAM drive is simply too good to offer...

    "Looks like Optane wins" - anyone can win when running unopposed. The moment someone makes a SLC/MRAM hybrid and it loses to hypetane, I will retract my statement and admit I was wrong. I have zero problem with that ;)
  • vanilla_gorilla - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    So you're saying Optane sucks because it would be slower than a drive that doesn't exist?
  • ddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    No, I am saying it "sucks" because for all intents and purposes, it is not any faster than a 2 year old drive that it was supposed to beat by a 1000 times.

    And the reason I put it "sucks" is because I never said it does suck. I give it a very realistic valuation. What sucks is how far that realistic valuation is from what intel promised. Which is entirely on them.
  • name99 - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    He's saying two distinct things.
    (a) This costs too much for what it delivers. IF Samsung wanted to compete with it, they could do so with a suite of existing technologies. But they probably won't do so because there is little demand for a product like this; honestly it only exists so that Intel can say "see, 3D-XPoint is too, real".

    (b) The place where 3D-XPoint ACTUALLY makes sense is, more or less, what AnandTech says --- as a slower (but much larger) RAM replacement. That's what plays to the technology's strengths (simple controller, byte-level access). But Intel STILL are not shipping that --- which makes one wonder WTF not?

    It IS reasonable to point out that Intel has been lying about this product since the day it was announced, and that the only reason they're shipping these SSD drives is to throw up more smoke to hide the fact that the actually sensible use case remains (for some reason) impossible.

    Being a fanboy isn't about always praising your company, it's about refusing to criticize your company even when they're clearly in the wrong. Intel is clearly in the wrong here, in the sense that nothing that they promised about Optane is actually reality even today, two years after the announcement.
    If you think that's reasonable behavior, ask yourself how you would react if your favorite villainous company did the same.
    Would you be impressed if AMD announced that they're going to ship a GPU 1000x faster than the competition, and two years later all they have is something 2.7x as fast (under very specialized circumstances)?
    Would you let Apple off the hook if they said that the Apple car was going to have 1000x the range of a Tesla, then they shipped two years later, a car with 2.7x the range of a Tesla?
  • Drumsticks - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link

    Re: AMD example: if AMD claimed a product would be 100x or 1000x faster than Nvidia, but only delivered something 6-10x faster in the majority of cases, and on par in the rest, for only 2-3x more money, I'd still be pretty satisfied.
  • phaethon1 - Tuesday, November 14, 2017 - link

    Nice post,

    I read in multiple channels about this SSD being able to be used as extra RAM. Then I contacted the technical support of Intel, and they do not have any clue about a software to enable this feature. Any ideas?
  • extide - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    SLC might be faster in sequential, but if you want sequential stripe a bunch of platters ..

    Also, I didn't say bit-level, I said block level. They present 512b blocks so you would assume the drive manages 'pages' in the size of 512b even though the underlying memory can be more fine-grained. SLC can't do that, plus there is still the whole garbage collection thing. If your hypothetical drive was actually a good idea, someone would make it. That's proof enough that it's not.
  • ddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    They didn't make one not because it is not good enough, but because it would be too good.

    That would set a bad precedent. Before you know it, people will start demanding quality rather than being content with what the industry dictates to them.

    Of course, if hypetane manages to make enough a hole in the pockets of big players, we will definitely be seeing some of that long-possible, deliberately untapped potential coming to life.

    "That's proof enough that it's not."

    You know, they make trucks that drive 24/7, under huge loads, and can go much long without maintenance than a regular personal vehicle. That's proof enough that the industry doesn't make things as good as it can, obviously, if it can make a heavily used and loaded truck more durable, that would be not only possible, but actually much easier to achieve for a regular car that's driven less, under less load. Yet they don't make it, even if that ends up costing human lives. And the reason for that is moar profit. Which is why they chose to only overbuild trucks, because that too maximizes profits. But not cars. Cars are far more profitable if need more servicing, and that doesn't result in profit losses as it would if it was commercial trucks, and if underbuilt cars end up costing human lives, that's a small price to pay for more profit. Engineering wise, is entirely possible and easily doable to make a car about 10 times more durable, and requiring 10 times less maintenance, and 10 times safer too, but they'd rather get the extra profit. And keep good engineering exclusive to military and commercial production.

    The reason they haven't made it is they didn't have a reason to make it. And the reason intel did hypetane is only because it has been a very long time since they did anything new. They had that in the works, and decided to release it in order to demonstrate some innovation, unfortunately, not without shamelessly lying about how well it will perform in advance.
  • Xpl1c1t - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    ddriver, i like your analysis. maybe the review system just wasnt equipped with rgb lighting, that would explain at least one order of magnitude of error in their results vs Intel's promises
  • jospoortvliet - Friday, November 3, 2017 - link

    > Engineering wise, is entirely possible and easily doable to make a car about 10 times more durable, and requiring 10 times less maintenance, and 10 times safer too, but they'd rather get the extra profit. And keep good engineering exclusive to military and commercial production.

    Well, yes, they care about their profits: nobody would buy such a super-durable car because it would cost 5-10x the price and people will go for the cheaper car, even though it has higher maintenance cost. This is true for nearly ANY product on the market: sure, you could built houses more durable, or bikes, or... you name it. But people prefer 'good enough' over 'perfect', always have. And they're not entirely stupid - many products' practical life time is fine, people quite like buying a new car every 3-5 years. Or new cups. Or new forks and knives.

    Yes, some folks pay the 10x price to get the perfect, durable stuff. But most buy pressed wood closets at Ikea and are happy with it.
  • Gastec - Saturday, March 10, 2018 - link

    I'm not sure if you are both ironic or are just too rich to think straight.
  • AlishaScott - Sunday, October 29, 2017 - link

    I just got paid $6784 working off my laptop this month. And if you think that’s cool, my divorced friend has twin toddlers and made over $9k her first month. It feels so good making so much money when other people have to work for so much less. This is what I do... http://cutt.us/O5gex
  • Nails6365 - Monday, November 6, 2017 - link

    Thank you for your in-depth analysis.

    Given the opportunity to make a high-end rig. What would you choose ?
  • Jared13000 - Tuesday, May 22, 2018 - link

    You’re not giving Optane enough credit, you don't necessarily compare a NAND based drive to an Optane based drive. Compare NAND to Optane, as NAND has had years of development pored into hiding its short comings that Optane has not yet had.

    I just built a small all flash hyper converged cluster and after setup I was getting about 500,000 random read IOPS on a quad node cluster with triple mirrored storage. Write speeds were about 1,000 IOPS, basically hard drive speeds across the 16 SSDs in the cluster.

    Was it bad drivers, miss configuration, ethernet flow control issues?

    None of the above. It was the drive cache. Storage spaces disabled it due to the drives not having power loss protection. Enabled the cache on all the drives to avoid direct NAND writes and now the cluster can push nearly 280,000 write IOPS. This mean with cache the drives are over 200 times faster than just writing directly to NAND.

    What does this have to do with Optane? As far as I have been able to find, Optane drives don't have or need a cache. Their performance is direct to storage, without cache!

    Taken in the context of NAND vs Optane, 1,000x may be embellished, but probably not by much. At this point PCIe overhead and lack of software optimization may be the only reason it’s not 1,000x faster when comparing modern NAND memory.

    It's not that much faster comparing a whole NAND drive with well implemented cache to an Optane drive, but some situations can't rely on cache. Also, a simpler drive should be more reliable, in theory.

    As it is Optane is unrivaled until someone manages to bring a drive to market with SLC NAND and nonvolatile cache like MRAM for about twice the cost of a 970 PRO.

    Just a thought, a 970 PRO 512 GB has an MSRP of $329 and the Intel 900p 280 GB has it’s MSRP at $329 as well. That is 256 GB of SLC flash vs 280 GB of Optane. Comparing an MLC drive to an SLC drive at half the capacity is a bit like comparing apples and oranges, but it’s a start for an estimate. Trade the DRAM for MRAM and bump the capacity a bit and it’s hard to imagine that a SLC NAND based drive with MRAM wouldn’t cost more than Optane.

    If you expected 1,000 times SSDs that are getting multiple gigabytes per second reads and writes, then you were looking for a drive faster than CPU cache. Intel really needs to watch their wording, but that does not make this a bad product.
  • CheapSushi - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    Well, then wait for Samsung's Z-NAND, which is MLC/TLC NAND treated like SLC.
  • ddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    "MLC/TLC NAND treated like SLC"

    That sounds like "a snail treated as a cheetah". I bet feeding antelopes to a snail will make it as fast as a cheetah.

    There is already a huge gap in access performance between MLC and TLC. TLC drives turn pathetic the moment they run out of cache. It is physically impossible to store multiple bits and access as if it is a single bit. Neither in terms of performance, nor in terms of endurance.

    We haven't even seen what SLC is truly capable of, only the very early SSDs had SLC, and back then they were crippled by the primitive and tremendously under-powered controllers. At the medium level, SLC is insanely fast.
  • MFinn3333 - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    OK, no that is simply not true.

    Fujtisu made a drive in 2014 entirely of Intel 25nm SLC and a Sandforce 2281 controller. It was called Fujitsu FSX 240GB (And 120GB). It kicked ass for it's class and time but it is nowhere and I mean nowhere near the speeds that are here or what you are claiming.

    I set a couple of them up in RAIeD-0 through both hardware and software RAID and while it did often saturat the bandwidth but only with sequential transfers. The only number that it could ever come close to matching anything here is when you are talking random writes. I could easily hit 220MB/s at 4K Random Write but it's Random Read speed was around 50MB/s at the best of times.

    SLC was and is awesome and I feel comfortable with doing horrible things to those drives (I defragged them for no reason, compiled code, did multiple virtual machines including Windows 3.11, and more benchmarking than any person ever should) but it's time is over.

    Get over it.
  • ddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    Oh wow, you are some kind of a tech genius, expecting raid to boost something other than sequential access.

    2014 is ancient history in the world of SSD controllers. SLC on the physical level is capable of 500-600 times better performance than what the "best" SLC controller could squeeze out of it.

    I am not saying this isn't the case for xpoint as well, I am just saying SLC is far more capable than what people can imagine.
  • MFinn3333 - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    "We haven't even seen what SLC is truly capable of, only the very early SSDs had SLC, and back then they were crippled by the primitive and tremendously under-powered controllers. "

    That is what you wrote, not about SSD's a few years ago but the very early ones. You moved your own goalposts.

    SLC is about 4x faster than MLC. You are claiming it to be 500x while showing little to no evidence and roasting Intel for their claims. So either put up or shut up with your evidence.
  • Reflex - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    SLC does not obey physics. Gotta take that into account. ;)
  • chrnochime - Wednesday, November 1, 2017 - link

    No comment when the other guy mentions 2014 is not "very early SSD"? Come on now. Your prejudice against anything other than SLC is showing. We all know early SSDs go back much earlier than even 2007.
  • edzieba - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link

    If SLC were truly better and cheaper than PCM, then companies would be using it and undercutting the competition with their cheaper, faster drives with lower production costs.
  • jospoortvliet - Friday, November 3, 2017 - link

    Indeed: https://xkcd.com/808/
  • extide - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    Regardless of the tests used here this thing is one of the fastest storage devices available PERIOD, and it's honestly priced pretty well. It's cheaper/GB than the first SSD I bought, in fact. I could see this being used for large swaps on servers that need a huge memory footprint for a lot cheaper than a shitload of RAM, or as a ZFS L2ARC or ZIL, or for hosting a ton of VM's or for running databases off of, etc.

    BUT you are ddriver, the king of cynicism, so I can at least say "I got what I expected."
  • ddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    I am also the king of "1000 times better means 1000 times better" ;)

    I too got what I expected, because I expected that "1000 times better" to be a lie.

    If you look at my comments, I am actually 100% objective about acknowledging the benefits of hypetane. Which is where my true biggest fault lies. How dare I be objective rather than expressing nothing short of complete awe and admiration?
  • melgross - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    You’re not as objective as you proclaim. If you were, you’d be more in line with what the conslucion says, which is that for many things there isn’t much of an advantage, but for others there is, and most of the reas\OSs aren’t the fault of this, but rather, old concepts in storage.
  • ddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    So in order to be objective, I will have to echo what AT - a heavily pro-intel biassed website says about it? Yep, that sounds legit :)

    It would seem you confuse objectivity for conformity.
  • r0gue6 - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    I can tell you are extremely bias simply because you use ignorant words like "hypetane" unironically.
  • ddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    Hypetane is perfectly suited. The product turned out to be 90% hype, and it also rhymes. What more could anyone possibly want?

    And calling things for what they are is the very essence of objectivity.
  • shabby - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    It is 1000 times faster... at die level, pcie and drivers show it down. /intel pr pro
  • ddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    Sure, if you say so. I mean it is obviously saturating and exceeding the PCIE bandwidth and crippled by the PCIE latency.

    Oh wait, it isn't. Maybe it is intel's controller then. Who knows. I mean aside from you ;)
  • lmcd - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    Ironic, because you aren't the king of anything.
  • voicequal - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link

    It's pretty clear Intel's performance claims were speaking of the cell level (NAND vs 3D Xpoint), not the system level (SSD, SYSmark, etc).
  • Drumsticks - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    Not that anybody will ever convince you that anything Intel can do is good, but here is a graph of how much endurance the 480GB Optane SSD has in terms of TBW compared to the other Pro SSDs.

    https://www.pcper.com/files/imagecache/article_max...
  • ddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    Cool, even if not real-world maxing out but intel's claim, I am willing to assume that intel won't lie on the spec sheet of an actual product.

    But then again, I am going to refer you to this little gem:

    http://images.hardwarecanucks.com/image/akg/Storag...

    The rated number is still almost 50 times less than what intel claimed officially. 45 times less is pretty significant IMO. Imagine getting a job where they promise you 20k $ a month, and end up paying you 450$ instead. Not cool. In light of that, I wouldn't say my criticism is ungrounded.

    For me personally, 20 times better endurance than NAND is pretty good, good enough to justify the purchase even at the present price.

    Now if only intel started out with a 20x claim instead of the 1000x claim, I wouldn't have any legit reason to bash that product. And maybe if more call intel on their BS, they just might cut it. And I don't think that will be a bad thing.
  • lmcd - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    Funny, when SSDs came out we were promised they'd be orders of magnitude faster than mechanical HDDs. The first ones weren't.
  • Drumsticks - Sunday, October 29, 2017 - link

    I think my primary point of criticism with your view is that, despite Intel not reaching their goals, it is measurably better than the competition at a better price per GB per performance.

    It might not have hit the endurance targets they wanted, but for 2-3x the cost of your opponent, they've achieved some 20x endurance, on par in the worst case, and 6-8 times better in many measurably important scenarios.

    On top of that, you tout the benefits of SLC and claim that SLC is undeniably faster than XPoint, because if SLC wasn't held back by the cheap and underpowered controllers of yesteryear, it could really fly. How do you know the same thing is not true of 3DXP? Perhaps better understanding of its use and a better controller, and maybe a second generation of the memory, will enable Intel to reach even higher performance and endurance heights. You can't claim that SLC is better, and is simply held back by 2014 era controllers, while not allowing that 3DXP could likely be held back by it's controller as well. We have no idea what the performance ceiling for 3DXP is, because we've seen all of one generation of products.

    To extend your analogy, I might be disappointed if I only received $450, but if everybody else is still only making $200, I'm going to go home happy.
  • Rektide - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    This shows an Intel 900P with a total write endurance of 8.7PB, and a 850 Pro with a total write endurance of 150 TB. But a stress test of a 850 Pro in fact survived 9.1 PB[1]! Meanwhile, if you reach 8.7PB on the 900P, Intel will forcibly move your drive into read-only mode.

    If you look at Ark, Intel describes it's Endurance Rating to mean "Endurance rating indicates the expected data storage cycles to be expected over the life of the device." When they say that, they mean "and not a megabyte more". Whereas when Samsung says it, they, at least once, meant "but this drive may go 60x more than it's rating". I really severely dislike this twist of the knife, this drastic change Intel and Intel alone is perpetrating against it's consumers.

    Does the P4800X also commit seppuku the megabyte it reaches it's Endurance Lifetime? I'm not sure if all Intel drives are so malicious, or is it consumer & enthusiast drives? How do I know which drives are programmed to self destruct on me, Intel?

    [1] http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/endurance-test-of...
  • ddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    It is actually worse than locking in read-only mode - on the next boot cycle the drive gets bricked. So if you didn't manage to get that data in time, it is gone forever. Great feature.
  • Spunjji - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link

    I have seen this with Intel consumer SSDs. It's amazing - it doesn't even tell you that it's failing and that you have one (yes, one) chance to backup your data before it goes forever. Usually the drive just throws an error, so your average user reboots the system and bam, the drive's not even in the BIOS anymore.

    Their drive failure behaviour is criminal.
  • voicequal - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link

    Agreed - bricking is a terrible failure mode for a consumer drive. For an enterprise drive, it *might* make sense, since its you want things to fail hard and fast so that backup systems can detect and take over.
  • FwFred - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    Wow, need a block button to improve SnR.
  • Meteor2 - Tuesday, October 31, 2017 - link

    Indeed -- though I simply skip any comments written by ddriver. Never any value in them (but a remarkably effective troll).
  • Lolimaster - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link

    The 1000X was supposed to be on latency and endurance, not much more, and maybe 10X random 4K performance.
  • CajunArson - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    I thought you were a reliable AMD koolaid drinker?

    It's funny how you insult these products that you have never used but would never in a million years hurl their $7000 Radeon SSG under the bus... you know, the one that uses a consumer-grade GPU slapped together with a RAID-0 array of cheap consumer-grade NVME drives to supposedly do rendering jobs faster than a regular GPU.
  • ddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    That only goes to show your thinking skills need a lot of work before they get useful.

    Pardon me for not clapping my hands and cheering at pointless mediocrity. Hopefully some day I will be able to reach that level of excellence ;)

    That's the limited mindset of today. If you applaud AMD's achievements, you have got to be an AMD fanboy, and when that same person criticizes AMD stupidity, it defines all logic, because only fanboys like AMD and fanboys don't criticize their idols, right?
  • CajunArson - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    Tell ya what, when AMD invents a completely new type of non-volatile storage technology that nobody has ever put on the market before then I promise not to literally ignore the actual facts that are set forth in Anandtech's review of the product to come to some predetermined bigoted conclusion.
  • ddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    AMD would probably invest in a lot, had it not been sandbagged by intel's illegal business practices over the course of decades. It was intel violating the cross-license agreement they agreed to first, and after that was no longer possible, they simply bribed the market away from amd.

    And don't me wrong. I do not "love" AMD, I do realize they only slow love for the consumer because they are not in the position intel is, which is a position they would definitely love to be in, and will abuse as much as intel does.

    My only concern about about AMD has to do with the fact that if they do better, intel has to do better too. True that AMD has a better track record, but again, that's only because they weren't in the position to do worse.
  • CajunArson - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    Yawn, another butthurt "OMG INTEL ILLEGAL" delusional fanboy.

    Fact 1: AMD founder Jerry fried-chicken Sanders took kickbacks from Microsoft to testify *that Microsoft was not a monopoly* in federal court. If Colonel Sanders thinks Microsoft was never a monopoly then you know he never thought Intel could possibly have been a monopoly.

    Fact 2: Your former hero Hector Ruiz ran AMD into the ground while paying himself more than Intel's CEO was earning while conducting insider trading. His contribution was to piss away AMD's ability to fab leading edge silicon while massively overpaying for ATi. Oh, and Bulldozer... yeah that was him too. Funny how Intel must have magically mind-controlled him and the rest of AMD into all those decisions!

    People like you love to blame other people for your own bigotries and personal failings. The last thing you could do is to ever think that your Holy AMD could possibly maybe not be perfect.
  • ddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    Thanks but my butt is fine, and branding makes a zero difference in my purchase decisions.

    You however are obviously a butthurt intel fanboy who got triggered by the very mention of intel's misdeeds, which are not a conspiracy theory but a PUBLICLY KNOWN FACT.
  • eddman - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    You are such a proponent of "facts", just like when you said Note 7 was sabotaged by intel and/or western powers to hold back samsung's and/or south korea's advancements without any shred of evidence.

    You simply do not like whatever intel, nvidia, (insert X,Y,Z company I don't approve of) make and try your hardest to dismiss them by pretending you are "criticizing" them and then trying to cover your personal attacks against other posters as "sarcasm" and by coming up with words out of a 14-years old's vocabulary like "hypetane".

    It would've been ok if you actually were a kid but you claim to be an expert of decades in pretty much everything. Very professional.
  • ddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    OK, you seem to have a problem with exploring eventualities. Do you have a problem with evolution? Or the big bang? Those are after all, just theories, some claim they make sense and have some factual or logical support, but they are essentially still just theories and not facts.

    My bet is you don't. You don't really have a problem with claims that are unsubstantiated by evidence, you only have a problem with those of them that are not endorsed by the status quo.

    Because you are a conformist. Which is also why you have a persistent problem with me, because it annoys you that I stand up to conformity and cultivate individualism. How dare I?

    Speaking about 14 year olds, I am pretty sure that unlike you, a 14 year old would get the joke. Optane - over-hyped -> hypetane. Probably even a 5 year old would. But not you, to you it is absolutely inappropriate for someone to mock the lies of a monopoly. Because you are a conformist. You are obligated to show respect and admiration. And you get triggered when someone does not.
  • eddman - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    Good job trying to pretend you just said it as a "theory". You mentioned it as an absolute, 100%, undeniable fact without ever using words like "maybe", "could be", "possibly", etc. and belittled anyone who said otherwise.

    As for the "joke", only a kid would come up and use something like that, right there with words like "poser", etc. You are such a professional critic that has to resort to such childish words. At least you finally acknowledged that you simply do all this for mocking purposes.

    Also, changing from the word "sheep" to "conformist". It seems you found a way to hide your insults. Yes, every single person in the world is a "conformist" except you. I'm sure your spamming on anandtech will finally get rid of the evil corporations.
  • ddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    "you mentioned it as an absolute, 100%, undeniable fact"

    That's your theory. Unless I explicitly said it is "absolute, 100% undeniable fact", it is only your insinuation.

    "You are such a professional critic that has to resort to such childish words"

    Nah, I just don't limit myself, foolishly believing that being "serious" will make me any smarter, you know, like you do. That's dumb, and I don't feel urges to be considered smart by dumb people.

    "It seems you found a way to hide your insults"

    Nah, I just don't like insulting sheep by comparing them to you. Unlike you, a sheep cannot help but be a sheep. Also, you clearly don't know what "spamming" means, and clearly ignorant of what else I do in regard with the "evil corporations" aside from "spamming".

    I am pretty sure if I was spamming or in violating the site rules in any other way, I would have been banned, don't you think? I haven't even gotten warnings, public or private. Let me know, if I am doing something wrong, would ya AT staff?
  • eddman - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    You do not care about what others think about you, that's why you keep commenting and boasting about yourself. You are a typical ego driven person. Keep spamming. AT cannot be bothered with you.
  • eddman - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    Nice deflection with "I did not meant it as fact since I didn't use such words."
  • Notmyusualid - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    @ eddman

    I wish AT WERE bothered by him - he is distracting in so many articles, with his nonsense opinions, that I can't see any real discussion anymore.

    I doubt he has any foot in anyone's IT door, as he seems to have amazing amounts of free time to spend commenting on here. Meanwhile - I've been on the go since 05:30 this morning, come here to read about new tech, and yet again, this troll clogging up potentially useful discussion.

    I believe ddriver has a mental personality disorder, I'm just not sure which one, since schizoids and narcissists can be similar in some ways, and in no way am I a psych doctor.

    Therefore, I wish him nothing but the worst life has to offer.
  • lmcd - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    I don't care if he ends up with the worst life has to offer, I just want his internet to die for a month or two so we can see what normal comment sections look like.
  • MamiyaOtaru - Tuesday, November 7, 2017 - link

    the fact that you think you need to explain the "hypetane" "joke", or that there's anyone who wouldn't get it, says everything that needs to be said about you. You probably felt super clever coming up with that one, cramming two words together like it was the height of humor, and that it was subtle enough some people wouldn't get it. Meanwhile, it was super obvious to *everyone*, so obvious that it isn't even close to funny. It's like you are operating on a lower mental plane and don't even know it, a dunning-kruger of humor.
  • sonny73n - Tuesday, October 31, 2017 - link

    Lol. Brutal.
  • Meteor2 - Tuesday, October 31, 2017 - link

    Ha ha, indeed!

    Please folks, don't reply to posts to ddriver. Don't even bother reading them. Don't feed trolls!
  • melgross - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    Trust me, you’ve already reached the level of pointless mediocrity. You can applaud your achievement.
  • ddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    Rule N1 - never trust people who say "trust me" ;)
  • lmcd - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    So I'll never trust your objectivity.

    As if I needed incentive.
  • investlite - Monday, November 6, 2017 - link

    LOL! Mediocrity? It's only 2.7x faster. Since you love analogies, the tesla goes 0-60 in 3 seconds. This does it in 1.4 and you're calling it mediocre. We get it, your disappointed that it's not 1000x faster. Here's my question, how have you not let go of something a company said two years ago?

    Talk about limiting your mindset, you've restricted your expectations to a statement two years ago when we have a tangible product in our hands now. How about you worry about what we've got instead of what was said about it two years ago?
  • investlite - Monday, November 6, 2017 - link

    I bet you're still pissed we don't have flying cars. OMG, do you go to every new car unveiling and talk about how crappy each new car is because we were supposed to have flying cars by now?
  • Gothmoth - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    when you do huge particle simulations you will want the fastest SSD you can get.
  • ddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    I've been doing that, for VFX as well as multiphysics simulations for over a decade. It has always been an in-memory thing. It doesn't seem they simulated it, it seems they read baked simulation data, and stored in some insanely inefficient manner at that.

    As I implied, this has got to be a new record in rigged benchmarks. Shame!
  • extide - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    Sigh, the Optane drive didn't improve the performance of reading the data into the simulation. The simulation required (significantly?) more RAM than the system had. They put a big swap file on either a 960 PRO or on the Optane drive. It probably doesn't even matter where the simulation data was stored.
  • ddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    Well, they should have bought moar ram then. Then maybe they could have kept that CPU busy at 100% and get much better time.

    I mean it is not like hypetane offers terabytes of capacity. Topping at 480 GB - that's entirely doable in RAM. More expressive - sure, but nonetheless a perfectly sensible investment if you are doing such simulations. It will pay for itself, as RAM is tremendously faster, and also doesn't wear, at least nowhere nearly as much as xpoint does.
  • extide - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    For that particular case, sure, maybe more ram is the way to go, but there are plenty of cases where the drive is better, like several of the ones I mentioned above. Most of those rely on the non-volatile aspect, which obviously RAM doesn't have.
  • ddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    As I said - it has its advantages and uses. I also said I might even buy it.

    And the only reason I call it hypetane is because intel shamelessly lied about it, and continues to cheat in order to make it look good even after it became evident that it is not anywhere nearly as good as they initially claimed, and call me old-fashioned, but I have a problem with that.

    It boggles the mind that people around here have such a problem with me just because I don't have my tongue up intel's rectum...
  • ddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    BTW, 1.1 billion particles, presuming the simulation is ran in FP64 mode, with x y and z coordinates for each particle would only require about 24 gigs of ram.

    Which raises the question, did they allocate each of those points on the heap or something?
  • ddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    Opsie, silly me, it would take another 24gb for the vector of force for each particle. Now it is a little more plausible that 64gb might not be enough.
  • CaedenV - Sunday, October 29, 2017 - link

    Sure, in a perfect world you buy more RAM. But if you are in a situation where you don't have infinate cash and you can buy more RAM at $7/GB or an Optane SSD for ~$1-2/GB then Optane begins to look a bit more appealing. A 480GB drive running as cache for $600 vs 480GB of DDR4 at $3350.... that would make almost anyone thing twice.

    Or in the case of my work, we have a bunch of clustered servers, and we are maxxed out on ram but not yet ready to do a server upgrade (hoping to get 2 more years out of them), but we need more fast cache for a bunch of different applicaitons. The idea of running those caches on this kind of SSD sounds a lot more appealing than running on traditional SSDs.

    But yes, when we upgrade servers, we will simply have more RAM on board. That is the obvious solution. But when a motherboard can only hold 256GB of RAM and you need more... life is often about compromises, and Optane tech sounds like a good compromise. But what you would use this for in daily life or in a normal computer? Man, that totally beats me! This product is almost too cheap for what it is good for (business class SSDs typically cost more than $1.25/GB still and are far slower than consumer SSDs), and completely useless and overpriced for that they are advertising it for.
  • BrokenCrayons - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    Yup, there's the ddriver we all know touting yet another set of unverifiable qualifications that proclaim relevant experience. From getting first pick of hard drives off the pallet at the shipyard to system security and now a decade of multiphysics simulation experience, this shamless self-promoter has done it all and is a SME in everything.

    It's too bad you're so transparently trying to set a new record in rigged life experiences. Shame!
  • ddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    You make a persuasive argument :)

    I criticize intel, that is great, therefore I suck, regardless of how grounded that criticism is.

    You criticize me, who sucks, therefore you are great, like intel, regardless of how baseless your criticism is.

    I wish I had such lowly and trivially attainable goals in life as you do. That would make things so much easier. I'd basically have to cheer and clap hands at my own stupidity to feel accomplished. Must be nice...
  • BrokenCrayons - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    The number of times you've replied in this article alone make it clear you serve no useful purpose to the world.
  • ddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    And I guess you responding to so many of my comments if just to whine about it makes you very useful, right? LOL
  • CheapSushi - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    Wouldn't be a AnandTech article without him. I pretty sure nearly every single one has some cynicism from him.
  • ddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    Go and check and come back with the results.
  • BrokenCrayons - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    I like the Optane articles the best when it comes to ddriver. They predictably draw him out and while in the context of Optane, he's even easier to manipulate than usual.
  • ddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    Oh wow, so you are manipulating me now. You mastermind you.

    Good thing I come out of my troll cave so you can ride that white steed of yours into glorious battle and once again find purpose in life, heroically championing for the dummies of mediocrity :)

    All hail the brave sir Dumb-a-lot.
  • BrokenCrayons - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    I can tell you feel like you've lost by the way you're resorting to childish name calling.
  • sonny73n - Tuesday, October 31, 2017 - link

    OMG ddriver. I've stopped reading your posts after page 3, but at page 8 now I'm still seeing your rantings. You definitely have serious issues.
  • Hurr Durr - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    He desperately needs some CNC time to calm down, be merciful.
  • Reflex - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    We need to compile a list of all the things you supposedly have been doing. I mean seriously, anything anyone brings up as a use case supposedly you've been doing forever at a professional level. And you use that imagined position to then attempt to clobber their own assertions about its applicability in the field they are discussing.
  • ddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    What can I say, I am a renaissance man. Also known as a polymath. I have scores of interests in all sorts of fields or science, arts and crafts, and I have employed many of those to make a living over the years. Where you collect pokemons, or postal stamps, or baseball hats or whatever, I collect skill and knowledge. Even the act of commenting here is part of my studies, social and psychological.
  • Reflex - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    Not only have you pursued your 'scores' of interests, you are the expert in all of them! We are truly gifted by your presence, I cannot wait to read your memoirs....
  • MarceloC - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    "What can I say, I am a renaissance man. Also known as a polymath. I have scores of interests in all sorts of fields or science, arts and crafts, and I have employed many of those to make a living over the years. Where you collect pokemons, or postal stamps, or baseball hats or whatever, I collect skill and knowledge. Even the act of commenting here is part of my studies, social and psychological."
    LOL LOL LOL!
  • sor - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    You clearly don’t care about immediate persistence, consistent performance, or random reads.

    The numbers make a clear argument that Optane won’t be all that helpful for light workloads, but we already expected that; there’s only so much super fast IO can do for you if you’re not using IO.

    I’d say those insane random reads and improved latencies live up to 3D Xpoint. There may be some elements to improve on but it is clear we are looking at a different, superior tech at a cost that is surprisingly affordable. Much of the initial talk about Xpoint was around whether or not it was real, if it was a hyped twist on regular flash, it seems clear it is a different animal.
  • ddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    You clearly didn't pay attention to what I've written. I did indeed acknowledge the random reads as an obviously strong point.

    Judging by the "destroyer", it won't be that helpful in heavy workloads either. In fact, contrary to what you say, where it shines the most is exactly light workloads, which is what low QDs are. Push higher queue depths and NVME catches up.
  • Lolimaster - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link

    With most work using big files, 4k random performance is meaningless, everything is linear so huge sustained write/reads are prefered. 960EVO/Pro wins.
  • ionstorm66 - Sunday, October 29, 2017 - link

    I wonder how much more performance that same test system would get if it had 128GB of ram. The 900P 280GB is 389 bucks, 64GB kit of ram is 500 bucks. I'd take 64GB of system memory over 280gb of ssd storage anyday, especially with a system with a 960 pro already.
  • mapesdhs - Tuesday, October 31, 2017 - link

    Unless of course you're doing something that needs ECC, in which case that cost comparison is rather wide of the mark.
  • dbartley - Friday, November 3, 2017 - link

    This guy is just a troll and a clown.

    ddriver - how many Optane reviews in the past 6 months have you commented on making the same arguments? I have seen you on at least 3 other sites making the same nonsensical argument about SLC SSDs. How many times has it been communicated to you that the "1000x" claim is based on the theoretical performance of the 3d Xpoint technology, not the performance of the first rollout of the product.

    Trust me, a good troll is fun every once in a while, but dude get a life.
  • royrkval - Thursday, December 7, 2017 - link

    When a thread is blocking on IO it shows up as 100% utilized.
  • Aymincendiary1 - Tuesday, May 8, 2018 - link

    Anybody know how to get Windows to recognize this drive as a system drive? I get an error from Windows saying it cannot install onto this partition - I have 260 GB of unpartitioned space available. It is not anything in the motherboard as i already called ASUS on this issue for thier WS x299 PRO/SE board. I didn't have this problem three years ago with Intel's HHHL NVMe drive. Windows 10 Preview as well as a licensed copy installed right away with no fuss.
  • extide - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    Well, damn that thing is fast! I want one!
  • Flunk - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    Wow, after all the talk about the price I was expecting $1000+ for the 480GB. The pricing on this is definitely on the money and the performance is clearly on a whole new level.

    But... in most client loads you'll never see it. I'd probably buy one anyway, but there is a good argument to be made just to save some cash and get the Samsung 960 PRO, which is by far the best consumer flash drive currently available.
  • extide - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    I agree, the price is actually pretty decent. It's ~ 1/2 the price per gig than the first SSD I bought years ago.
  • AnnonymousCoward - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link

    WTF are you guys talking about. The 960 Pro is 2x the cost of an MX300! Probably worse reliability too, based on the "They're all dead" SSD review. I don't know why you guys and the author are so hung up on the stupid 960 Pro, a serious ripoff (unless you're a part of the 0.1% of users who would use it in a way to see superior performance).
  • mapesdhs - Tuesday, October 31, 2017 - link

    #include <troll.h>
  • AnnonymousCoward - Sunday, November 12, 2017 - link

    Again, WTF. The above 2 posters said the 960 PRO is a decent price and "by far the best consumer flash drive currently available". They are wrong, as it's 2x the cost of drives that perform the same. This is worth pointing out. That doesn't make me a troll. The 2 posters should thank me for the information. Wise people like information.
  • BrokenCrayons - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    Optane's first consumer storage drive looks very promising. That endurance is crazy impressive and is the change the industry needs to get us moving in a better direction than NAND. The prices are reasonable for the capacity and performance, but I'd like to see reductions in power consumption and (probably) heat output so its realistic to get 3D XPoint inside laptops.
  • ddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    I'd reserve judgement in regard with endurance until I see how many TBs written before it cr@ps out.

    Laptops - that activates my hilarity unit. It can only shine in enterprise workloads, laptops are inherently underpowered and targeted at completely different workloads.

    We need to get it into smart watches, now that will be a game changer. Imagine the possibilities ;)
  • BrokenCrayons - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    "Laptops - that activates my hilarity unit. It can only shine in enterprise workloads, laptops are inherently underpowered and targeted at completely different workloads."

    The millions of customers that purchase mobile workstations find your misunderstand laughable.
  • ddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    I highly doubt mobile workstations sell in the millions. They are a rather niche market.

    And I know that mobile workstations are used for very different workloads from the enterprise. Clearly, you lack insights into "workstation" and "enterprise" ;)
  • BrokenCrayons - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    If, by "enterprise" you're trying to imply server workloads, then sure, I'd agree that mobile workstations fill a different computing role in the workplace. However, there's nothing preventing a storage-intensive workload from ending up on any sort of laptop, even a consumer-oriented system.

    Why intentionally close the door to storage technologies? Is it a brand loyalty hangup? Do you really care that much about what company logo is on a product? Its sort of an inferior and defective mental state you've got there over something as meaningless as what company developed a particular product. Or are you close-minded over the idea that the performance claims weren't met? That's almost as irrational as brand loyalty (or dis-loyalty in your case...which is equally silly, by the way). Decrying a reasonably priced product that performs well because it didn't live up to a marketing claim merely means you haven't the capacity to put aside your emotions and see a product for its usage past the crap you get fed by meaningless product announcements. That's just as dumb as falling prey to marketing to begin with. Either way, someone with the ability to control their own emotions and think rationally wouldn't be in the situation you're in right now.
  • ddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    There is no such thing as a "server workstation". There is this thing called "server", and this thing called "workstation". There is some very minimal possible overlap in specs, but the two are used for completely different purposes.

    Hypetane's advantage is mostly due to the controller rather than the storage medium. And that performance obviously comes at a high power cost. Which is why I am not seeing this make its way into laptops, where it will offer next to no real world performance benefits while being a significant power drain.

    You love wasting money to have worse battery life or something?

    Emotions? U crazy? This is electronics, it's just stuff, inanimate matter. Who would see it in an emotional context, aside from braindead fanboys?

    One of the many things I do is also to play the guitar. People are always like "you don't love your guitars enough" - coming from people who collect guitars for decoration and barely even play and naturally suck at it. To which I reply - "to me the guitar is not a fashion accessory, it is an instrument, I cannot love it any more than I can love a hammer or a wrench or an electric drill".

    It is the same for hardware. Some may buy it for bragging rights or self esteem. I buy what I can afford as long as it can serve the purpose I buy it for. Surely I didn't like buying intel CPUs the last 10 years, but when AMD's got garbage, there is nothing I can do about it.

    What drives my criticism of intel is their shitty act. They pretend as if they are the drive of innovation, but they have actually held technology a hostage through their monopoly, and impeded competition and progress tremendously, causing irreparable damage to humanity. You don't have the capacity to understand how much better things could have been had progress not been hostage of the greedy and corrupt but I do. And they keep on doing it even after being caught red-handed. As they say, "a leopard cannot change its spots".

    The real problem however is "people" like you being reduced so low, not only do you NOT have a problem with the degradation and exploitation of your own species, you go forth to applaud it. Honestly, what does intel have to do to get criticism from you? Run over your dog? Burn your house down? Chop your hands off?

    It is your fault that intel's act is so shitty. People like you, who let it slide and even applaud it. It is your fault amd wasn't competitive for a decade. It is your fault that they ask 10000 dollars for a piece of silicone that costs 50 dollars to make. AT servers will run out of storage space before I list all the shit "people" with your mindset and responsible for.
  • BrokenCrayons - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    Yup, easily manipulated.
  • lmcd - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    Please help me understand how GloFo was ever going to catch up enough for AMD to realistically have competed? They're only finally competing with the slowdown post-Moore's Law. Blame whatever you want but Intel's process advantage brought them massive performance advantages and design advantages. Add in the importance of yields -- as core count increases, yield becomes massively more important. AMD never was going to compete with Intel until the barrier to improvement became physics itself, and not merely our tools of manipulation.
  • utmode - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link

    How come Moore's Law is law when it is not a law anymore or never been. It
  • AndrewJacksonZA - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    "Intel has almost taken all the fun out of testing a SSD."

    :-)
  • jjj - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    The drive has very high power consumption and the power meter fails? That's very very suspicious and you should have delayed the review.
    To make it worse, the results will be published only in bench and the review not updated?
    I can't trust you anymore, ever.
  • Billy Tallis - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    The main power meter failed before the Optane drive arrived. The whole-system power meter was unaffected.
  • lmcd - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    I can't trust your comments either anymore, @jjj. But who's counting?
  • wookie monster - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    Why no write consistency test? I was able to experiment with a prototype Optane drive, and I found that running a long-haul randomly-ordered write test on the Optane drive was substantially faster than the fastest available flash-based SSDs.
  • Billy Tallis - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    I plan to do a lot more to this drive, including steady-state random write comparisons against consumer and enterprise SSDs. There just wasn't time to include more tests in this article. I've only had the drive for six days.
  • wookie monster - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    I look forward to the results, thanks!
  • willis936 - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    I also really like the performance over time plots. An investigation into power and thermals (and potential throttling) would be interesting.
  • takeshi7 - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    It's pretty obvious that once an SSD is installed in the system, game load times are limited by the CPU, not the storage. This is why this Optane drive won't load games significantly faster than a SATA SSD (especially when you consider the price increase). Can Anandtech please test how different CPUs affect game loading times?
  • Scannall - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    For the vast majority out there, this seems like a solution in search of a problem. As expensive as it is, you'd be better off raiding a couple nvme drives and calling it good.
  • ddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    Nope, raid-ing will in no way improve their weak spots - random and low queue depth access. It will only boost sequential and high QD performance, which is already superior to that of hypetane.
  • citrix13 - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    Thank you ddriver for your objective, unbiased and logical observations.
    Many in here cannot comprehend what you have been saying which is unfortunate.
    Your core point is that Intel promised 1000x performance with Intel Optane
    Intel did not deliver 1000x performance, they gave orders of magnitude less
    Also, i take note that you praised the drives endurance and low queue depth performance and said you may buy it.
    Commendation on being able to call a spade a spade, but still being able to see it strengths
  • ddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    Yeah, and now you will either get crucified for straying from the herd, or you will be labeled a fake account I made to compliment myself :)

    It is not really worth the trouble you know, I don't care about approval.
  • lmcd - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    I bet you also are advocating against future upgrades to Anandtech's comment system, with which even a crowd as small as Anandtech's would use to bury your unwanted, pointless, and untruthful comments.
  • Reflex - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    Optane is a technology.
    Today's article is about a product, which happens to use Optane in combination with other technologies.

    Intel's statements about Optane were about the capabilities of the technology. And indeed, for those who know much about PCM they were reasonable statements.

    Actual products are not guaranteed to maximize the ultimate potential of a given technology, especially in their first revisions. In 1995 when most motherboards were transitioning from a BIOS ROM to a Flash BIOS, a company could have stated that the potential for Flash was 1000x the performance of the older ROM based technologies. And they would have been correct. Even though the earlier Flash devices achieved speeds only of a couple MB/sec.

    Flash BIOS chips were a product. Flash, NAND or NOR, are technologies. Those technologies had major potential which has been largely realized over the two decades since that time. Products have gotten better as supporting technologies have improved (such as controllers and bus interfaces) and predicted improvements in Flash were made (die shrinks, power optimization, parallelization, die stacking, etc). That does not make any of the early PR about the technology inaccurate, or even misleading. It was all true and over time it was demonstrated.

    Intel stated the potential of Optane. Two years later they have started releasing products based on it. None are yet capable of reaching its stated potential, after all a 1000x performance improvement would exceed the bandwidth of any connected bus, much less the controllers in their current state and likely the current manufacturing technologies. But they launched with what is undoubtedly the fastest storage device on the market by a significant margin, with reliability that is multiples of any competing technology, and a cost that is significantly lower than expected for such a halo product.

    That is a very successful launch. And given what they have stated Optane is capable of (all reasonable targets for PCM), I am optimistic about the future.

    And I am glad Samsung will have competition again. The market has stagnated both in price and capacity.
  • looncraz - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    I have a specific workload that can (at peak sustained) can read 3~4GB/s and write out about 1.5~2.0GB/s from storage (at the same time to different drives - some data to/from GPU, some to/from CPU). Optane would actually slow me down quite a bit.

    The 4KiB block size is simply not an issue that requires solving any more. Software adapted already.
  • Manch - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    Out of 6 pages of comments that idiot rambles on and on for 5 of them. I'm pleading with the UK government to reevaluate and censure the internet usage of their crazies......JTMC.....just shut up.
  • Reflex - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    I miss the days when we had intelligent commentators on articles here.
  • ddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    You mean the days you didn't have them and still had the idyllic, innocent, ignorant garden of tech Eden, where feeling intelligent was as easy as posting a "great review, great product, me want" comment.

    Funny story, I evidently didn't have a point of reference until recently, when I visited the comment section at wccftech. Now, after having see that, I do also see how you could cultivate the illusion that the AT comment section may appear to be intelligent, if only relative to that random offtopic pic trolling, but I can assure you, there is no intellect in "on-topic sucking up".

    You definitely have a problem with factual intelligence, and that problem has to do with realizing it is something that you do not posses. Which makes you cranky. You do have a choice thou, you can remain antagonistic to actual intelligence in order to protect your lack thereof and hold on to the much more easily attainable illusion of it, or you can take steps to acquire intelligence for real, but I warn you, it will change your world forever.

    And just to let you know, you can become intelligent without becoming an ass like me. Those are two different traits, not related to each other.
  • lmcd - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    Honestly, if you've got so much experience in the field, you should spend more time in it. You're clearly excessively valuable and should not waste your talents talking to such unintelligent plebian commenters.
  • Reflex - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    Yes, obviously prior to your arrival no one writing for or commenting on this site or its articles had any in depth knowledge of technology. Thank goodness you finally arrived to enlighten us all. I have no idea how the technology industry, writers and community even managed to invent the pocket calculator before you arrived.
  • mkozakewich - Monday, October 30, 2017 - link

    When you see their names, just scroll past the entire message thread. It'll save you a lot of time and sanity.
    (I agree, though; it was annoying scrolling through four or five pages!)
  • Meteor2 - Tuesday, October 31, 2017 - link

    I always switch to 'read comments as a single page'
  • mapesdhs - Tuesday, October 31, 2017 - link

    I've used the scroll wheel so much, I had to buy a new mouse... :}
  • Rektide - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    Does the P4800X self-destruct/go-read-only after it reaches the advertised 20.5 PBW endurance?

    That's twice what a Samsung 850 Pro managed in a stress test, but the Pro is a consumer class device. The idea that I'd buy some fancy enterprise drive that would stop operation the second it's endurance rating is over makes me fume.
  • mkozakewich - Monday, October 30, 2017 - link

    From what I've heard, they never stop. At that point, they'll be out of warranty, but they'll continue to work at poorer and poorer performance levels.
  • FwFred - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    I see the comments are 50/50 impressed vs not impressed by this review. I also see that ddriver is 50% of the comments 😂
  • Notmyusualid - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    @FwFred

    Indeed. I thought the drive was amazing. I guess ddriver read some other article.
  • todd.nonja - Monday, October 30, 2017 - link

    I needed a good laugh after wading through the muck that ddriver has been spewing. Thanks for that!
  • mapesdhs - Tuesday, October 31, 2017 - link

    Definite lol marker point. :D
  • iwod - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    The price is much cheaper then I thought!. For what it is capable of I think this is actually cheap. This is a first gen ( third ? ) product. So i expect there should still be lots of headroom for improvement. But i still struggle to find the use of it in normal day to day computing.

    While latency is extremely important, you dont want your system to Jank or halt, but newer SSD is nearly avoided the problem. And as NAND gets cheaper ( Which isn't happening.... ) and better controller, I would call this problem solved.

    SSD continues to uses less power, something that is important in Laptop market. And for 99% of our workload we are no longer limited by I/O. As shown in the benchmark with very little performance improvement, why should i get a Optane is an question that needs better answer from Intel.

    What i think will be interesting, is the use of Optane SSD on Database server, with those kind of latency, Random Read Write, and Endurance, it think this is going to be a gigantic leap forward.
  • DanNeely - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    Yup. I was expecting it to be several times more expensive. Still more than I'd be willing to spend if building a new system but only; only because I don't think I could live with only half a TB for long before running low on space, and I don't want to do the multiple drives thing again. (I currently have about 400GB used on a 1 TB SSD). 2nd/3rd gen in 2-4 years when I build my new system I could see dropping $500ish for a ~2TB model if it exists then.
  • ddriver - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    You probably missed the slide where intel positions this product at "eSports" - believe it or not, it will make a world of a difference. You may not see even 1% of improvement, but it will definitely make you much better at eSports.

    But then again, you can get exactly the same benefit from just putting a sticker on your box, without actually paying for the product. It is enough for others to think you have it.

    Sarcasm aside, at this price it is a good purchase for database usage. But only if very low latency is required, meaning a local server on a very fast network, and the server is being lightly loaded. For an internet server the advantages will be diminished by the internet connection bottleneck, and for higher loads, as evident from the test results, SSDs do catch up as the QD increases, and still offer significantly lower cost per GB.
  • lmcd - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    While the endurance shut-off seems pretty ridiculous, I'd imagine as this technology ramps up its density and cost-efficiency it will supplant traditional NAND in the data center before traditional NAND even garners much of a foothold.
  • iwod - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link

    I think the reality is 90% of consumers are never going to hit that endurance number, ever. Statiscally speaking, they are much more likely to get a Memory Error, Capacitor malfunction, Power Supply issues or likely their CPU heat cooling system ( Increasingly a problem ) messed up before that number ever arrived.

    And I think another problem, is Intel cant figure out the best endurance time and method on this new tech. And they are playing it safe then sorry. Running a 10 PB test takes time.
  • "Bullwinkle J Moose" - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    Thank you ddriver

    I was going to let the My Banhammer stand until I remembered why I love this site so much...

    It's not the articles, it's the comments

    You have learned well my friend!
  • eddman - Sunday, October 29, 2017 - link

    Horses attached to the same carriage. Keep pulling.
  • peevee - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    Looks like this thing is fast enough to be used as swap drive for memory-intensive tasks.
  • Reflex - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    This is a good product for those who can benefit from it, and a great start for the first major advance in solid state storage we have seen in many years. Hopefully the price continues to come down, power consumption declines and capacity rises. I will be very interested in seeing whether or not they can achieve the projections that were made when the technology was first announced.
  • Huayra - Friday, October 27, 2017 - link

    Is it possible to install macOS on it using thunderbolt enclosure connected to a Macbook?
  • Ippokratis - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link

    Hi, nice article.
    1 - Can Optane be used as a scratch disk for Ryzen / Threadripper, OSX /Linux ?
    2 - Could you please a compiler (gcc, javascript) benchmark ? Random IOPS are very important in compiling and making compile times shorter is a good reason to buy tech - consider it as a real life test.
    Thanks
  • peevee - Monday, October 30, 2017 - link

    Agree with compile test. On 16+ core machine though, not 4 measly cores. And source code which does not all fit in RAM.
  • Lolimaster - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link

    Optane seems like a Joke not only in endurance, performance, but not power consumption too. Right now it's basically a bot for random 4K, you don't really need that, get the 960EVO/PRO.
  • Lolimaster - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link

    *now.
  • AnnonymousCoward - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link

    Why are you saying get the 960 PRO? It costs double a normal SSD and performs the same in real-world. Please enlighten me.
  • SunnyNW - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link

    Would system start-up be any faster?
  • Lolimaster - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link

    Probably yes since it has higher random 4k read and latency. Wanna check the limit, search those old ramdisk booting times. Above that we would need a boot disk of L3 cache memory class, then one made up of L2 cache memory class, edram, etc.
  • Lolimaster - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link

    Till you reach L1 cache memory class or sram.
  • "Bullwinkle J Moose" - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link

    That depends....
    How fast is Fast?

    I've seen people bragging on youtube that their new 90+ Watt Quadcore Intel CPU will boot Win 10 to an M.2 EVO drive in 17-20 seconds....

    But my 35 Watt dualcore Sandy bridge will boot Windows 10 Fall Crappers Edition (Sept 2017) to an 850 Pro in 5.35 seconds.....

    or, the same machine will boot Windows XP-SP2 to the same 850 Pro in 3 - 4 seconds (Varies sleightly every boot)

    So, how fast is fast?
  • jabber - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link

    Good luck to the couple of dozen or so that will be able to make proper use of this and notice a difference over a 850 EVO .
  • Pork@III - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link

    Do fast? Yes it is fast. Has volume? - Nope.
    I maked install of operation system and come to install FM7 on 128GB SSD and instalator say me: "not enough space". :(
  • nOOky - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link

    The 280 gig drive is priced similarly to the Samsung 830 Pro 256 gig when it came out if you're thinking the price is outrageous...
  • Lolimaster - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link

    The past is the past, few years ago, a 20GB HDD cost $200 so?
  • btb - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link

    Does the Optane 900P have support for hardware based Bitlocker encryption?

    Currently I have a motherboard with a TPM, and an SSD with Microsoft eDrive/TCG Opal/IEEE 1667 support, and thus support for hardware based(not software) Bitlocker.

    Would the Optane work in a similar manner, if I use it as a boot drive?
  • voicequal - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link

    Mixed reads & writes are a significant weak spot for SSD performance, where a sequential write workload can degrade a sequential read workload and vice versa. It looks like Optane has completely resolved this (no more bathtub curve). It would be interesting to see a mixed sequential test with QD > 1, so that both read & write requests are in the queue. In theory, throughput could be 2x under 50/50 mixed workloads if Optane is fast enough to saturate the full duplex paths, like the PCIe bus, in both directions.
  • evilpaul666 - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link

    I ordered a 480GB AIC version from the popular online vendor. I was surprised it was actually available. Seems to be bucking a trend this year.

    Hopefully, Intel ironed out the bugs and there won't be crashes until multiple firmware updates over the next year.

    Anecdotally, I've heard good things about improved UX. I'll find out in a few days. It's replacing an Intel 750 400GB from about two years ago.
  • Mikewind Dale - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link

    This is awesome. But what excites me most is using XPoint to replace RAM.

    I wonder, can we get an approximate simulation of what that world could be like, by making a system with a deliberately minuscule amount of RAM, installing a 32 GB Optane module, and setting the Windows page file to be on that Optane module? I'd be interested to see some benchmarks.
  • evilpaul666 - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link

    There was a demo of a system with only 4GB RAM that was supposed to have had good results.
  • "Bullwinkle J Moose" - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link

    Would System Start-up be any faster?
    ---------------------------------------------------
    Faster that what? Apples to Bannana's?

    A 35 Watt Dualcore Sandy bridge will boot a fresh install of Windows 10 Fall Crapper Edition (Sept 2017) in 5.35 seconds to a Samsung 850 Pro

    or, the same computer will boot a fresh install of Windows XP-SP2 in 3 - 4 seconds (it varies every boot)

    Then, I've seen people bragging on youtube for booting new 90+ Watt Quadcore machines to Windows 10 on an M.2 drive in 17 seconds

    So, wutz your opinion?
    How fast is fast ?
  • cheshirster - Sunday, October 29, 2017 - link

    Those prices are FAKE.
  • CaedenV - Sunday, October 29, 2017 - link

    Come on Intel! Storage isn't what this tech is made for! This was supposed to have faster throughput and act as a RAM replacement, not SSD replacement! Being able to replace RAM and storage with something that is slightly slower than RAM, but the capacity of a large SSD would have huge benefits. Imagine 'launching' a program and all that needs to be done is to flip a flag from inactive to active and your whole program is up and running. No loading from the HDD/SSD into RAM, just activate a section of memory and update the windows registry keys if needed. Having direct HDD/SSD access to the CPU without needing to load into RAM first. These would be huge advantages. But instead Intel saw that it wasnt going to be good enough for that so they released what they had as a way to cash in and make up for all of the wasted R&D on this tech over the years.

    Granted; it is not ALL bad. For consumers this would be like burning money. But for business use this is amazing tech. At my work we have a huge document management system with some ~6 million documents in it, and 200+ users running searches on them all the time. On HDD these searches would take just over a minute. We recently moved the search cache to SSDs which dropped the search time down to ~10-20 sec. With Optane we could lower it to near instant search times. Not going to do it any time soon, but there is absolutely a market for this kind of tech in the business IT world. I just don't understand why Intel is marketing it to gamers.
  • Reflex - Sunday, October 29, 2017 - link

    To be fair, the software ecosystem is a decade or more behind the concept of unified memory. Even if this was a capable RAM replacement today, nothing could take advantage of it, and wouldn't be able to for a very long time.
  • Kevin G - Monday, October 30, 2017 - link

    The software side does lag behind hardware by a substantial amount of time. However, the ground work is already being done. The first initial wave of support will be mundane as a 'RAM disk' but with firmware/hypervisor/OS support so that only Optane DIMMs are utilized for this functionality. Software overhead would still exist for the file system but legacy support would be maintained. I think patches already exist for this level of functionality in Linux, though I'm unsure if they're been rolled into the mainstream kernel.
  • Kevin G - Monday, October 30, 2017 - link

    Intel still has this potential on their road maps for 2018 with the Cascade Lake Xeons. Supporting Optane as memory requires some changes in the memory controllers and Intel is only targeting their Xeon lineup with such support. This was initially to arrive with Sky Lake-EP but was cut at the last minute due to apparently some bugs found in testing. This is what there are a few Sky Lake-EP motherboards out there with an extra memory slot that can't be used: it was only for the unreleased Optane DIMMs.

    The other thing is that Optane DIMMs were NEVER hyped to be faster than commodity DRAM. Intel never set that expectation and from all accounts, Optane is genuinely slower. However, byte addressability is there as is a strong increase in endurance for it to function in such a role, if slower. Any sort of performance gains will stems form various ideas that you mention, like the removal of a traditional storage stack etc.

    The other side of storage is capacity which Intel has really yet to demonstrate. Their talk of Optane DIMMs were to hit 1 TB per DIMM eventually but the sizes here point toward capacities in DIMM format roughly the same as traditional DIMMs (128 GB right now in servers with 256 GB on the horizon). I know of a few big data guys that dream of a system that could easily support 96 TB (1 TB DIMM per slot, 12 DIMM slots per socket, 8 sockets total) that would permit their entire cluster to be run on a single node and in-memory. At this point having the Optane DIMMs being slower than DRAM wouldn't matter as it would eliminate traditional bulk storage and networking overhead which are slower still. The potential is huge at the highend if Intel can get the technology out in the right form factor and at the capacities they need.

    Only reason Intel is launching like this now is that they need to get the technology out there and ramp up production. If it weren't for the Sky Lake bug, they would have launched the DIMM format by now.
  • 4shrovetide - Sunday, October 29, 2017 - link

    If someone picks up one of these and doesn't play games or just doesn't want the Star Citizen code, would you mind sending it to me? 4shrovetide@gmail.com Thank you in advance to anyone who helps out!
  • AnnonymousCoward - Sunday, October 29, 2017 - link

    What a copycat name, 900P! Like 950 Pro.
  • Kevin G - Sunday, October 29, 2017 - link

    I'm disappointed over all.

    The latency advantage is genuinely there as is random performance (which latency is factor in itself) but sequential performance falls short of the hype. What is disappointing as well is that only the 280 GB drive is going to be offered in U.2 format and capacities top out at 480 GB even of the add-in card model. The real ugly factor is power consumption which to Intel's credit wasn't hyping up prior to launch is high relative to other SSD solutions.

    The biggest promise of 3D Xpoint/Optane is in DIMM form factor with byte addressability. Intel delayed that last minute with Sky Lake-EP and told people to expect that with Cannon Lake-EP. It looks like Cannon Lake-EP is being delayed due 10 nm issues into 2019 so we're getting a 2018 refresh of Sky Lake-EP called Cascade Lake with the missing Optane DIMM support back-in. The hype of Optane was that while radically slower than DRAM, you do get nonvolatile support and a massive capacity increase, everything else being equal. The performance equation does change as operating system and applications are adapted to an all in-memory centric view (i.e. the concept of long term disk storage is removed, everything is seen as 'in-memory'). It isn't that Optane magically becomes faster but simply that a chunk of software necessary to work in today's view of fast volatile memory and slow persistent memory is no longer needed. It is simply an opportunity to gain in algorithmic efficiency by not having a traditional storage stack. This effect can be seen again if Optane DIMM sizes are well beyond that of DDR4 DIMMs and used in conjunction with large socket (think 8 or more) that could replace some clustered workloads and removing the networking stack from the performance equation.

    The really big disappointment is this launch doesn't point toward living up to the remaining hype at all. The lack luster capacity today certainly implies that the DIMM sizes necessary to threaten DRAM may not happen. 128 GB registered ECC DDR4 LR-DIMMs are out there today and 256 GB models are on the horizon. From the looks of it, Optane could make the 256 GB capacities in DIMM form and certainly come in cheaper but that wouldn't be as large of a game changer. Sure, the software changes for a pure in-memory system could still happen but it wouldn't enable any new workload that couldn't be done via current software and memory capacities. Tried and proven will win out even if it is more expensive because it is known quantity that works.
  • "Bullwinkle J Moose" - Monday, October 30, 2017 - link

    Any thoughts on Advanced Persistent Threats that will be lingering around when 3D Xpoint/Optane is in DIMM form factor ?

    Seems no-one has yet been willing to address the issue

    I would never consider persistent memory for just that reason alone

    And, swapping boot drives or restoring backups won't help it seems

    Any comments on the issue?
  • Kevin G - Monday, October 30, 2017 - link

    While a threat may persist in non-volatile memory, it still needs to be executed which is invoked from the host system. Cleansing an Optane DIMM maybe as simple as putting it into a system that is programmed to immediate wipe said Optane DIMM. There will always need to be a means to do some initial configuration/initialization which would be embedded at the firmwire level. In other words, the DIMMs don't have to be running an OS for them to be securely erased.

    Similarly, moving a DIMM from one system to another system is also possible, though the default should actually be to do nothing by default. As weird as it is, there exists the possibility of moving a running application from system to system by this method. This goes to your point about security. Thus the default for any system capable of hot swap or detecting a newly installed DIMM after power cycle, should not actually access the contents of that DIMM until given instructions to access it.
  • "Bullwinkle J Moose" - Monday, October 30, 2017 - link

    But wiping the DIMM defeats its very purpose for existing..............PERSISTENCE!

    Kaspersky found out how bad malware can be when it only runs in system memory and never touches a disk, networking the infected systems added persistence to the threat

    If you need to wipe the DIMM or disconnect from any networked machines, you eliminate any tiny perceived benefit this technology "could" give you over the tech we already have

    I say "Tiny" benefit only as it relates to the "massive" threat it can create from being persistent
  • regis440 - Monday, October 30, 2017 - link

    Faster then SDRAM PC133. Sign of the time :)
  • jrs77 - Monday, October 30, 2017 - link

    General purpose storage starts at a very minimum of 1TB these days. 2TB would be more appropiate with the ever growing filesizes of high resolution video and image-files.

    480GB is filled up with a handfull of game-installations allready these days. So these SSDs are only usable as OS/software disks and for that the price is way too high.

    Call me again when SSD-prices drop to ~ $100 / TB. Then we're talking usability as general storage drives.
  • Nikijs - Monday, October 30, 2017 - link

    pls anand. just kill ddriver acc. he ruins all comment section. he's maybe "smart", but lives in another dimension, where he thinks he is only one who understands something. i bet he never ever achieved something worthy in his life. thats where all hidden anger comes from.
  • daremighty - Tuesday, October 31, 2017 - link

    I don't agree that Anandtech's approach to measure random performance. QD1 random is directly reflect the latency of memory chip (NAND or 3D Xpoint). Between the queue, there should be some idle time and it didn't explain the real random performance of device. Under random workload, the device should handle multiple random requests - it means deeper QD is more natural to explain the random performance of QD. Probably, many device would require deep QD to saturate the random, but I think it is still valid metric. I think in random, random performance with deep (64 or 128?) QD is as much important as low QD (1/2/4?). Again, low QD is just shows the NAND performance, not SSD performance.
  • rep_movsd - Tuesday, October 31, 2017 - link

    Seems like the great ddriver is an expert in all things, and his opinions of "Hypetane" are based on solid fact and "decades" of experience (of bashing intel I guess).
    All the people who buy Intel are idiots and those who praise Intel technology are shills...

    Meanwhile, Optane and similar technologies will eventually replace SSDs and ddriver will still be grumbling about how SLC would have been better if given a chance....

    Get with the times - no one is forcing anyone to buy anything Intel - and if you think anandtech fudges benchmarks, put your money where your mouth is and try doing a fraction of what they do...

    Don't pour cold water on others efforts just because you have some PTSD with Intel for whatever reason...

  • "Bullwinkle J Moose" - Tuesday, October 31, 2017 - link

    "Get with the times"

    Thats a great comment!

    Seems like ddriver might have gotten a timeout several days ago and yet a few of you can't seem to get over him

    Just admit it, you loved his comments and want him back, or else you could get with the times and get over him

    He's gone, but look at the bright side.....
    I'M BACK!
  • rep_movsd - Wednesday, November 1, 2017 - link

    Yes, I love him, like all trolls love other trolls
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  • DocNo - Saturday, November 4, 2017 - link

    Intel's caching software for Optane sucks - super finicky, not easy to integrate with an existing system and most of all requires specific motherboard to work (which I happened to have, but not the right partition layout - I dunno, technical documentation for what they want is pretty nonexistent).

    Luckily I stumbled PrimoCache. Downloaded a trial and had it working with my m2 Optane in 5 minutes. Made a noticeable and rather dramatic difference, even when loading stuff off of my Samsung EVO SSD. For $20 it was worth the frustration of not having to figure out Intel's poorly documented and overly fussy software. And if you don't have an Intel supported board, this lets you use Optane for caching with any board with an m2 slot.

    These Optane drives would be awesome for servers - based on the experience with my desktop I now use PrimoCache on a couple of my servers and even with cheap SSDs the difference is amazing. With larger Optane drives? I should be even better. And at $120 for the server version it's by far the fastest way to add SSD caching to Windows Server. I'm extremely happy with it!
  • weevilone - Sunday, November 5, 2017 - link

    That's interesting.. wish I had known about PrimoCache when I was tinkering with the little Optane stick. Intel's software was a huge mess, and Intel was less than helpful in working through it. When I finally went to remove it and throw in the towel, neither the software nor the UEFI could remove the stuff. I wound up having to reinstall Windows.
  • Kwarkon - Monday, November 6, 2017 - link

    I'm quite curious what exact issues you had, especially with disabling Optane?
  • mattlach - Saturday, December 30, 2017 - link

    Looking at that random 4k write performance, I'm thinking a pair of these would be absolutely fantastic as a mirrored SLOG/ZIL device for my massive ZFS pool. It's very tough to predict through.

    Question is how they would perform on the dual socket Westmere-EP Xeons powering my storage box, with only PCIe Gen2... Probably won't make a huge difference since the write speed peaks out at about 1.7GB/s and 4x PCIe Gen2 tops out at 2GB/s.

    I wouldn't mind a decent boost to sync write speeds, and this 900p seems like its tailor made for the job. No cache, so there is no need for battery/capacitor backup, and very high speed, low latency random writes...
  • Gastec - Saturday, March 10, 2018 - link

    As a computer enthusiast I find that "Recommended Storage Configuration" pyramid from Intel highly insulting. $6000? And Wikipedia plays along with lines like "An enthusiast PC implies the early adoption of new hardware, which is sold at a premium price". Premium price! So an enthusiast nowadays is synonymous with wealth and willingness to fork out any amount of money to the Multinational Corporations!
  • KDMann - Tuesday, April 6, 2021 - link

    Mr. Tallis,

    An otherwise good article was ruined when I read this nonsense you wrote:

    "...avoid the consequences of Microsoft's stupid NVMe driver write cache policy defaults, which severely curtail the write performance of consumer NVMe drives that have volatile write caches."

    Unlike ANSI T10 and T11 SATA and SAS (and SCSI before it), NVMe is not a 'real' standard -- meaning it is not defined by any non-commercial standards body such as ANSI. This means that there is no guarantee that any given vendor of an NVMe SSD will be selling a product that responds correctly to write-cache inquiries. NVMe is an industry trade association that has no means of enforcing or sanctioning any vendor that does not follow this "non-standard standard".

    Bashing Microsoft for this is stupid.

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