Intel Optane SSD 900P Offers Stunning Linux Performance

[Spooktra]

I have one complaint with this review, and it's actually a complaint of mine regarding every single HDD/SSD review I have ever seen on any site, namely they do disk I/O tests that tell us nothing about how this drive will benefit a person in every day use.

I would like to see a test where the OS is installed on each drive and the PTS is run as if a cpu review was being done to see if the faster drive actually has any benefit in day to day tasks. The numbers I read here tell me nothing, run a 3d rendering benchmark, an encoding benchmark, a gaming benchmark, a large file copy from one drive to another, this that people actually use their computers for.

People are going gaga over this drive as if the numbers mean anything to them, to me they mean squat in terms of how they relate to real world experience.

[Zan Lynx]

People are going gaga over this drive as if the numbers mean anything to them, to me they mean squat in terms of how they relate to real world experience.

The Star Citizen development teams are using Optane drives in their workstations. Faster compile times for programmers and fast loading of assets for artists and designers. It is a noticeable difference that probably adds up a few minutes at a time each day. It also makes them happier computer users.

[WonkoTheSaneUK]

Intel sponsored this year's Star Citizen event "Citizen Con" in Frankfurt, as a launch event for the Optane SSD.

One was thrown to the audience as part of the reveal, another 150 attendees found Willy Wonka style "Golden Tickets" in their convention goody bag (including myself!)

All the drives given away were the HHHL PCIe x4 280GB type.

Sadly, my Z87 system is too old to be able to boot from a PCIe drive, so it's upgrade time...

[starshipeleven]

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.

Did you look at the article right? Micheael's bigass server has slots only for 2.5'' drives. Modern servers are moving towards the 2.5'' hdd form factor.
There are some pretty cute and murderously expensive 2.5'' 10kRPM SAS drives for them too.

The main reason 3.5'' exist is because of mechanical reasons related to spinning platters in traditional drives, SSDs and probably also modern hard drives don't care.

[caligula]

Did you look at the article right? Micheael's bigass server has slots only for 2.5'' drives. Modern servers are moving towards the 2.5'' hdd form factor.
There are some pretty cute and murderously expensive 2.5'' 10kRPM SAS drives for them too.

The main reason 3.5'' exist is because of mechanical reasons related to spinning platters in traditional drives, SSDs and probably also modern hard drives don't care.

For comparison I used Seagate Barracuda Compute 5 TB vs HGST Ultrastar 12TB. A 2 x 5.25" slot backplane can hold either 3 x 3.5" or 8 x 2.5". The 2.5" form factor is still 25% more expensive per terabyte, although comes with 10% better data density and 20% lower power consumption, but this assumes 5400 rpm drives vs 7200 rpm for 3.5". I'd guess the 10k RPM drives consume a lot more. You also need almost three times as many ports form the disk controller..

[Slithery]

You can buy PCIe x16 cards that provide 4 U.2 connectors each. I believe SuperMicro has a server design that does something like 20 NVMe drives through dual high-end Xeons and PCIe PLX switch chips.

No need for dual Xeons and PCIe switches, you can run 24 drives at full whack (96 lanes) with a single EPYC (128 lanes), this is the setup in the test server used.

[niner]

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.

5W is what my whole laptop draws idle with an active screen. It's completely out of proportion for a laptop SSD. A typical 2.5" SSD draws around 0.05W of power when idle. That's 2 orders of magnitude less.

[eva2000]

wow disk performance has come along way from when databases used 4-8x 15K SCSI/SAS raid 10 heh

[Zan Lynx]

5W is what my whole laptop draws idle with an active screen. It's completely out of proportion for a laptop SSD. A typical 2.5" SSD draws around 0.05W of power when idle. That's 2 orders of magnitude less.

I wonder about Optane power usage. Is it running a literal heater in there to keep the temperature up, or something similar? There seems to be no other reason to use 5W of power at idle.

[Spooktra]

The Star Citizen development teams are using Optane drives in their workstations. Faster compile times for programmers and fast loading of assets for artists and designers. It is a noticeable difference that probably adds up a few minutes at a time each day. It also makes them happier computer users.

I was thinking of benchmarks where we might see results such as these:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/11953/the-intel-optane-ssd-900p-review/2

The Houdini rendering where the render went from 17.4 hours to 6.3 hours just by switching to an Intel Optane drive.