Intel's first Optane product entered the market almost a year ago, putting the long-awaited XPoint memory in the hands of consumers. Currently, Intel is expanding the family with Optane SSD 800p, pushing the Optane brand closer to the mainstream.
The new Optane SSD 800p is NVD M.2 SSD using XP XP XP memory from Intel instead of flash memory. 800p is based on the same hardware platform as the Optane Memory M2 drive last year, aimed primarily for caching purposes (but can also be used as a boot drive with a fairly small operating system). That means 800p uses a 3 x2 PCIe link and XP XP first generation 3D memory - but more than that, with 58GB and 118GB of usable capacity compared to just 16GB and 32GB from Optane Memory last year. The PCB layout has been tweaked and the sticker on the drive no longer has a foil layer to act as a heatspreader, but the most significant design changes are on the drive's firmware, which now supports power management including low-power standby states.
Low Optane Memory product capacity forces Intel to position it as a drive specifically for caching in front of a much larger hard drive, but the Optane SSD 800p has enough space to serve as the primary storage. While 64GB class drives have disappeared from the current flash-based SSD product line, there are still many 128GB class drives. This drive capacity is certainly not roomy, but sufficient to install the operating system and some applications. For users who do not install a large AAA game video or handle a large collection of videos and photos, the 118GB 118p may not even feel too restrictive.
For flash-based SSDs, small capacity is often to be avoided because its performance is much worse than the larger model. The relatively small 128Gbit (16GB) capacity of a single XPOW 3D die means the Optane SSD avoids the limited parallelism caused by small flash-based drives, and the performance of one XPoint 3D die high enough so that not much parallelism is required. start with.
The higher capacity offered by Optane SSD 800p over Optane Memory also allows much higher writing performance, which is the biggest drawback of Optane Memory. However, this only brings the performance level of 800p to slightly faster than SATA, with sequential write performance rated at 640 MB / s and 4kB random at 140k IOPS. The read speed is slightly faster than 32GB Optane Memory and also looks worse than flash-based SSDs, but Intel determines this performance at the depth of the queue four, which is much lower than the flash-based SSD that needs to be topped. throughput
The addition of a low power sleep state brings the idle 800p power rating down to just 8mW, compared to the 1W rating on the smaller Optane Memory module. Resilience for both capacities is 200 GB / day for a five year warranty period. Given its small drive capacity, it generates 1.7 or 3.4 write drives per day, which is much higher than normal for consumer SSDs.
The 58GB and 118GB capacities look odd compared to the more usual numbers like 120GB or 128GB which are commonly seen for SSD based flash. The reason the 800p has a slightly reduced capacity is the 3D XPoint die capacity is actually very compatible with the nominal 128GB, while the NAND flash combines extra space above its nominal capacity to allow for error correction and wear rate. For Memory Optane, the difference between the power of two 32GB definitions and the definition of a traditional 32GB drive producer provides ample space, but the 800p error metadata and error correction require slightly more used space.
The price for Intel Optane SSD 800p is similar to the $ / GB base to Optane Memory, which is now much cheaper than the launch price of last year. However, this still leaves the 800p as the most expensive SSD consumer on the market with capacity and base per GB, with the 58GB model exceeding $ 2 / GB. Even the ultra-high-end 900p is cheaper per GB than the 800p.
A competition:
No closest competitor with Optane SSD 800p. Intel Optane SSD 900p is a consumer-focused derivative of their company Optane SSD DC P4800X and inherits high power consumption and large add-in or U2 PCIe cards. The existing Optane Memory M2 module is closely related to Optane SSD 800p, but its low capacity prevents it from being used for the same purpose.
Among the flash-based SSDs, there are some latest generation 128GB SSM SSDs but no 64GB class drives. Small flash-based SSDs are all relatively low-end and much cheaper per GB than Optane SSDs. NVMe high-end SSDs that are roughly in line with the 800p price tend to have a fourfold capacity.
For this review, we compare 800p with other Optane products from Intel and against a wide range of NVMe-based flash SSDs ranging from entry level drives to premium Samsung 960 PRO.
Intel also sends four 118GB models, so for curious we have some benchmark results from the use of RAID. For these tests, the Optane 800p M.2 module is installed on ASRock Ultra Quad M.2 cards and tested in our enterprise SSD testing system, using Windows 10 and Intel Virtual RAID on CPU (VROC) drivers. The company's testing system includes all the latest firmware and OS patches for bugs and vulnerabilities, so the test results reflect the overhead of the mitigation in addition to NVMe RAID software costs. Single-drive test results are all recorded on our regular consumer SSD testing system that has not received firmware or OS patches for Specter and Meltdown.
Many of our current SSD tests are not designed with small thrust. Results for 32GB Memory Bandwidth and Optical SSD 800p 58GB do not represent the exact same workload as the larger drive. Some synthetic benchmarks of normal performance fail to use the 64GB range of drives, and in the case of smaller drives, testing only uses the entire drive. Likewise, the workload shown by the ATSB Destroyer and Heavy Test does not fit that small drive. The small drive still performs the same read and write volume, but the block address on the I / O trace that is outside the capacity of the drive is wrapped to fit. The ATSB destroyers and heavy results for both drives can be viewed as representative of the performance of the drive as a cache device, but excludes the cache cache effects that will be present in tiered storage configurations.