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The Intel Optane SSD 800p (58GB & 118GB) Review: Almost The Right Size
Intel's first Optane products hit the market almost a year ago, putting the much-awaited 3D XPoint memory in the hands of consumers. Today, Intel broadens that family with the Optane SSD 800p, pushing the Optane brand closer to the mainstream.
The new Optane SSD 800p is an M.2 NVMe SSD using Intel's 3D XPoint memory instead of flash memory. The 800p is based on the same hardware platform as last year's Optane Memory M.2 drive, which was intended primarily for caching purposes (but could also be used as a boot drive with a sufficiently small operating system). That means the 800p uses a PCIe 3 x2 link and Intel's first-generation 3D XPoint memory—but more of it, with usable capacities of 58GB and 118GB compared to just 16GB and 32GB from last year's Optane Memory. 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 to the drive firmware, which now supports power management including a low power idle state.
Prices are $129 and $199.
Also at ZDNet.
Previously: First Intel Optane 3D XPoint SSD Released: 375 GB for $1520
Intel Announces Optane 16 GB and 32 GB M.2 Modules
Intel Announces the Optane SSD 900P: Cheaper 3D XPoint for Desktops
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday March 12 2018, @07:50AM
The revolution was supposed to come with Crossbar RRAM or another company's post-NAND technology putting terabytes of super-fast non-volatile storage memory in stamp-sized form factors.
XPoint beat (rushed?) rivals to market but doesn't do much better than fast SSDs. It is good at low queue depths, has good random read/write performance, and better endurance.
It is designed to fill a gap between DRAM and NAND, but can't overtake either one like other post-NAND technologies might be able to do in the future. The price/GB, at $1.68/GB with the 118 GB drive, is in between DRAM and NAND. But you still want DRAM and NAND in your system. Maybe you could try DRAM + XPoint + HDD instead, but you'd probably do better with just DRAM + NAND and no XPoint.
Some were warning of the death of NAND (due to endurance issues) before NVMe and XPoint existed. But 3D NAND came out in 2012 and now we're talking about using 3D QLC NAND and 96 layers. NAND density has increased a lot more than expected. Up to 1 terabit dies [anandtech.com] are in the works as well as multi-terabyte packages, allowing SSDs with 100 TB or more soon.
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