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
Related Stories
Intel has released a 3D XPoint drive. It's not vaporware!
The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X has a write endurance rating of 30 Drive Writes Per Day, and Intel is hopeful that future products can offer even higher ratings once 3D XPoint memory has more broadly proven its reliability. Today's limited release 375GB models have a three year warranty for a total write endurance rating of 12.3 PB, and once the product line is expanded to broad availability of the full range of capacities in the second half of this year the warranty period will be five years.
Intel is offering the 375GB P4800X in PCIe add-in card form factor with a MSRP of $1520 starting today with a limited early-ship program. In Q2 a 375GB U.2 model will ship, as well as a 750GB add-in card. In the second half of the year the rest of the capacity and form factor options will be available, but prices and exact release dates for those models have not been announced. At just over $4/GB the P4800X seems to fall much closer to DRAM than NAND in price, though to be fair the enterprise SSDs it will compete against are all well over $1/GB and the largest DDR4 DIMMs are around $10/GB.
The product is not as fast at sequential transfers as some SSDs:
The raw specs for the P4800X leaked in February. To summarize: it's a datacenter-oriented part, built for applications with high read/write loads, looking for low latency. The sequential transfer rates of 2400MB/s read, 2000MB/s write, are good, but some of the fastest NAND flash can pull slightly ahead. Where the P4800X excels is its ability to sustain high I/O loads, courtesy of those low latencies.
[...] The P4800X can do 550,000 read IOPS and 500,000 write IOPS, but critically, Intel says it achieves this even at low queue depths. The spec sheet figure has a queue depth of 16, and the company says that a queue depth of about 8 tends to be about the limit seen in the real world. Moreover, Intel says that the latency of each I/O operation remains low even under heavy load. 99.999 percent of operations have a read or write latency below 60 or 100 microseconds (respectively) with a queue depth of 1, rising to 150 or 200 microseconds with a queue depth of 16. Under a comparable load, Intel's own P3700 NAND SSD can only serve 99 percent of operations with a latency below about 2,800 microseconds. Likewise, under sustained write workloads, the P4800X retains its low latency for reads, whereas the read latency of the P3700 NAND steadily deteriorates as the write bandwidth increases.
Intel has announced two 3D XPoint products positioned as caches for consumer desktops. The M.2 modules store 16 GB for $44 ($2.75/GB) or 32 GB for $75 ($2.34/GB):
Intel just announced two new products that bring Optane technology to the consumer desktop. Optane is loosely defined as the company's products built with 3D XPoint technology, a next generation non-volatile memory structure built from the ground up to reduce latency. The new Optane Memory products will ship in two capacities (16GB and 32GB) and give users access to a whole new performance tier--as long as you have the supporting technology in place, mainly a 200-series chipset.
Pricing for Optane Memory M.2 2280 modules start at just $44 (16GB) and peak at $75 (32GB). The operating system recognizes the new products as addressable storage, just like a regular hard disk drive or solid-state drive. Intel told us that support for the drives as cache starts with the latest 200-series chipset products that feature an additional four PCI Express lanes over the older 100-series chipset.
The magic happens when you enable a "modified" version of Smart Response Technology and build a cache array with the Optane Memory standing invisibly in front of an HDD or SSD. The Optane Memory becomes a cache device that accelerates I/O for data retained in its memory structure from previous I/O requests.
Compare with the previous story about a 3D XPoint SSD for the enterprise: First Intel Optane 3D XPoint SSD Released: 375 GB for $1520. Many more of us could find $44-75 to blow on this cache.
Intel has announced new 3D XPoint "Optane" solid state drives at two capacities:
The Intel Optane SSD 900P will come to market in two capacity sizes, 280GB and 480GB. The series uses two form factors, 2.5" U.2 and half-height, half-length add-in card (AIC). This will start to get confusing so look closely. The 280GB will have two 2.5" models on launch day. One comes with a standard U.2 cable and the second comes with an M.2 to U.2 adapter cable. The 480GB will not ship in a 2.5" form factor until a later date. It will ship in the add-in card form factor starting today.
Regardless of the form factor or capacity size, all Optane SSD 900P drives deliver up to 2,500 MBps sequential read and 2,000 MBps sequential write performance. This is lower than some of the other high-performance NVMe SSDs shipping today, but we will address that in the next section. The drives also deliver up to 550,000 random read and 500,000 random write IOPS performance. This is class leading performance, but there is more to the story.
3D XPoint memory performance is closer to the speed of DRAM than NAND used in SSDs. SSD marketing numbers show maximum performance that comes only at high queue depths. Most of us rarely surpass queue depth 4 and the faster the storage, the less likely you are to even build data requests. This memory addresses the problem with performance at usable workloads.
In the chart [here] we have the three fastest Intel consumer storage products from different market segments: SATA SSD, NVMe SSD, and Optane NVMe SSD. We've also added the new Seagate BarraCuda Pro 12TB, the fastest consumer hard disk drive shipping today.
Pricing is $390 for 280 GB, and $600 for 480 GB. That's $1.25/GB for the larger drive, compared to $2.34/GB for the 32 GB Optane Memory M.2 2280 and the launch price of $4.05/GB for the 375 GB Optane SSD DC P4800X (Reviewed here).
3D XPoint is a non-volatile memory/storage technology.
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 "Ruler" Form Factor for Server SSDs
Crossbar, which has talked up its version of a post-NAND memory/storage technology for years with little to show for it, now has to compete with the elephant in the room:
Crossbar, developer of Resistive RAM (ReRAM) chips, is setting up an AI consortium to help counter, er, resistance to the technology, speed up its adoption, and hopefully outrun Intel's Optane.
ReRAM is a type of non-volatile memory with DRAM-class access latency. So, flash-style solid-state storage with RAM-ish access. However, it is taking a long time to mature into a practical technology that can be deployed in devices to fill the gap between large-capacity, non-volatile, relatively slow NAND, and high-speed, relatively low capacity, volatile DRAM.
[...] Crossbar claims it can design "super dense 3D cross-point arrays, stackable with the capability to scale below 10nm, paving the way for terabytes on a single die." Beat that, Optane. Check out a white paper from the upstart here (registration needed.)
Crossbar continued to develop its ReRAM, inking a licensing agreement with Microsemi in May last year, involving the use of sub-10nm ReRAM tech in coming Microsemi products.
[...] Crossbar says it's working with Japanese authorities to review opportunities for the 2020 Olympics, including video-based event detection and response capability. We'll see if anything comes of that.
Previously: Crossbar 3D Resistive RAM Heads to Commercialization
Related: SanDisk and HP Announce Potential Competitor to XPoint Memory
Fujitsu to Mass Produce Nantero-Licensed NRAM in 2018
Two Resistive Random Access Memory (RRAM) Papers
Intel Announces the Optane SSD 900P: Cheaper 3D XPoint for Desktops
Intel Unveils 58 GB and 118 GB Optane SSDs
Rambus and Gigadrive Form Joint Venture to Commercialize Resistive RAM
Micron Buys Out Intel's Stake in 3D XPoint Joint Venture
(Score: 1) by snmygos on Monday March 12 2018, @06:08AM (4 children)
"The chipmaker says it has sequential read speeds of up to 1,450MB/s and sequential write speeds of up to 640MB/s. Random read and write speeds peak at 250,000 IOPS and 140,000 IOPS, respectively."
Half the speed of a NVMe and twice the cost. Need some progress.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday March 12 2018, @07:28AM
The irony is that NVMe [wikipedia.org] was created [theregister.co.uk] with XPoint in mind [eetimes.com].
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by wonkey_monkey on Monday March 12 2018, @05:41PM (2 children)
NVMe is an interface, these are drives. How is either comparison valid?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 12 2018, @11:56PM (1 child)
They are both 2 channel devices. So 'half the speed'.
Current xpoint is equiv on speed with SSD. Random r/w at 1-2 queue depth it smokes SSDs. Everything else it is fairly similar.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWqO36Zj65k [youtube.com]
I am with this review. What is the use case for these? They are too expensive for what you get. Yet too small to be useful for the low latency you get.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Tuesday March 13 2018, @12:31AM
My point is that compariing speeds in this way is like comparing a road's speed limit with the maxmimum speed of a car. You don't say "this road is twice as fast as this car."
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 1) by milsorgen on Monday March 12 2018, @07:19AM (1 child)
These have some advantages that aren't really apparent on the surface of marketing material but it's the damn size and price that's putting the breaks on it all.
On the Oregon Coast, born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days...
(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.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by cocaine overdose on Monday March 12 2018, @10:02AM (2 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 12 2018, @07:17PM (1 child)
Where's the +1 incoherent rambling mod?
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday March 12 2018, @08:35PM
I think he's referencing the "rowhammer" attacks that plague DDR3 and DDR4 DRAM modules. And how the CEO apparently sold all the stock he was legally allowed to right before news about the Spectre and Meltdown vulns dropped.
Dr. Rockso here (he does koh-KAAAAYNNNNNNEEEE! Chchchchchchyeeee~ah!) appears to be another troll along the lines of Ethanol-Fueled; actually, he looks like Eth and Arik had violent sweaty mansex in a vat of CRISPR polymerases and this was the result. *Can* we call him Dr. Rockso from now on? Because that mental image is fucking hilarious.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...