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posted by martyb on Monday October 30 2017, @04:54PM   Printer-friendly
from the ecks-point?-ten-point?-cross-point!??! dept.

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


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by Aiwendil on Monday October 30 2017, @06:17PM (3 children)

    by Aiwendil (531) on Monday October 30 2017, @06:17PM (#589571) Journal

    * Often faster than 960 Pro
    * 10 DWPD @ 5yr
    * 280gig or more.
    * Fails by going read only. (Why don't you market this more?)

    Dammit, I just bought a new system drive.
    I only hope it has good wear levelling.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 31 2017, @04:05AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 31 2017, @04:05AM (#589855)

    It's twice the price of a Samsung 960 Pro though. So if you really don't need the 10DWPD or 7X random read performance going for a Samsung might be good enough.
    https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147596 [newegg.com]
    https://www.anandtech.com/print/11953/the-intel-optane-ssd-900p-review [anandtech.com]

    I'd be tempted to use the Optane for when the RDBMS isn't fast enough despite all the optimizations... In many orgs lots of RDBMSes won't even get close to 10DWPD.

    • (Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Tuesday October 31 2017, @08:15PM (1 child)

      by Aiwendil (531) on Tuesday October 31 2017, @08:15PM (#590184) Journal

      The thing that caught my interest was that it fails to read-only.

      I acutally do need a high-ish write endurance since I don't even blink if I shuffle some 500gig around during a single day and easily can have a drive in service for a decade (however my normal daily use is in the 5-25gig usage).

      But I agree it is on the expensive side (especially if its planned usage is less than five years)

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 01 2017, @04:29PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 01 2017, @04:29PM (#590632)

        The thing that caught my interest was that it fails to read-only.

        Shouldn't be that big a deal if you are backing up important data regularly enough. But yes it's nice if you can "ghost" the failed drive to another one and get stuff back up with very little downtime.

        The 400MB/sec random reads would be a gamechanger for certain use cases.

        It'll be nice if OSes could use such drives well as a read AND writeback cache. Yes I know Linux has SSD caching and there's stuff like Intel SRT, but so far I haven't actually seen any benchmarks of such stuff showing that they work that well: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux-48-bcache&num=2 [phoronix.com]
        https://www.lifewire.com/intel-smart-response-technology-833444 [lifewire.com]

        e.g. Mediocre performance compared to plain SSDs (bcache) or may not work reliably enough (SRT - people keep recommending not to use maximized mode, including Intel support staff).