Intel Optane SSD 900P Offers Stunning Linux Performance

[Zan Lynx]

Wow, very impressive. The price isn't that bad, $1.50/GB. SSD's used to be more expensive not that long ago. That SQLite bench is out of this world.

What type of connector is it? You just plug it into the U.2 socket? Would the cable fit under a GPU card (is it stiff)?

These also come in an AIC (add-in card) format, which is a PCIe card format.

The U.2 format is for use in drive bays. Instead of a SAS or SATA cable it's a U.2. U.2 is really just a PCIe lane extender.

[AndyChow]

Wow, very impressive. The price isn't that bad, $1.50/GB. SSD's used to be more expensive not that long ago. That SQLite bench is out of this world.

What type of connector is it? You just plug it into the U.2 socket? Would the cable fit under a GPU card (is it stiff)?

I guess I got confused. The U,2 is a cable socket, not like the M.2 socket. You can get an M.2 socket to U.2, but it's not really elegant. I guess this is a transition period. There are so many hard-drive sockets, and no consumer board have 6-8 sockets like we have in SATA3. So we aren't about to build a RAIDZ2 at home soon with these drives.

[AndyChow]

Wow, very impressive. The price isn't that bad, $1.50/GB. SSD's used to be more expensive not that long ago. That SQLite bench is out of this world.

What type of connector is it? You just plug it into the U.2 socket? Would the cable fit under a GPU card (is it stiff)?

[andyprough]

This thing is THICC, it's over standard 2.5'' drive height. It won't phisically fit in a laptop anyway.

Nothing that a hammer and a screwdriver won't fix.

[Michael]

Would really love to see some file system comparisons.

I'm guessing that filesystem journaling is actually making performance worse on these devices, since they write-in-place, don't care about locality, and have low enough latencies intel are endorsing polling over interrupts.

FS comparison should be done this weekend or early next week.

And welcome to the forums.

[wolfwood]

Would really love to see some file system comparisons.

I'm guessing that filesystem journaling is actually making performance worse on these devices, since they write-in-place, don't care about locality, and have low enough latencies intel are endorsing polling over interrupts.

[franglais125]

This thing is THICC, it's over standard 2.5'' drive height. It won't phisically fit in a laptop anyway.

Thanks, didn't know that.

Also, 14w of heat in there is a fire hazard for laptops.

Indeed.

[schmidtbag]

This thing is THICC, it's over standard 2.5'' drive height. It won't phisically fit in a laptop anyway.

Also, 14w of heat in there is a fire hazard for laptops.

Makes you wonder why they didn't just make it a 3.5" drive. Pretty much all desktop PCs support at least one of those. Though I haven't entered a mainframe since 2011, I'm sure many places are downscaling their servers, and have all this empty room for larger drive bays if necessary.

14W isn't that bad for laptops, when you consider that's full load or burst usage. For a drive this fast, you're going to have a hard time pushing it to its limits for an extended period of time. The 5W idle is much more tolerable, and not a whole lot dissimilar to a typical 2.5" SSD.

Regardless of potential heat output or physical size, I wouldn't waste a drive like this on a laptop anyway. Are there even laptops that support U.2 drives?

[starshipeleven]

So, in summary: more endurance (10x), but more power consumption (10x on average, depending on load). Perhaps not yet ideal for a laptop? Am I reading this right?

This thing is THICC, it's over standard 2.5'' drive height. It won't phisically fit in a laptop anyway.

Also, 14w of heat in there is a fire hazard for laptops.

[schmidtbag]

I may not be a fan of Intel, but there's no denying that this is by far the best performance you can get without doing a RAM drive. And considering it's non-volatile, that makes it even better.

I honestly don't think this drive is that expensive for what it is. Personally, I wouldn't buy it, but I do see myself recommending this to those who have a need for extremely high bandwidth (and that being said, this wouldn't apply to home users). I also don't like that it uses U.2.


If having huge amounts of raw sequential read/write performance is your priority for a decent price, RAID0 SATA III drives is still a viable option. That ought to handle most workloads. But for anything beyond sequential read/writes, RAID0 is not worth the investment for SSDs.