Intel Optane SSD 900P Offers Stunning Linux Performance

[starshipeleven]

The only funny thing is that Intel is marketing the consumer-level drives to gamers who won't see a real benefit in most games where reading from an SSD isn't really a bottleneck.
The drives are absolutely great for workloads that can actually push I/O though.

No benefit, but SSDs cause significant psychological addiction. If someone gets used to even a half-assed SSD they won't go back to traditional hard drives. Especially on laptops.

These things are powerful enough that even on a desktop system they are going to cause some serious SSD addiction, and will cause peer pressure on others.

[chuckula]

The only funny thing is that Intel is marketing the consumer-level drives to gamers who won't see a real benefit in most games where reading from an SSD isn't really a bottleneck.
The drives are absolutely great for workloads that can actually push I/O though.

[franglais125]

This is incredible.

I was at the same time wondering how it compares to (e.g.) a Samsung 960 Pro, not only wrt performance. Here are some numbers:

Optane 900p 280GB
5.11 PB and a MTBF of 1.6 million hours
Power: 5 Watts idle, 14 Watts load.
5 year warranty

960Pro 512GB
0.4 PB, and a MTBF of 1.5 million hours
Power: 0.1 Watts (idle), 5 Watts (load)
5 year warranty

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?

And yeah, I don't find this expensive, not with that performance.

[microcode]

I don't know about you, but the price seems amazing. It is unthinkably close to flash in pricing, given the novelty of it. I expected it to be well outside the range of a mid-tier enthusiast or typical professional, but I can actually see myself buying one of these.

[chuckula]

You did not mention whether it has power loss protection capacitors.

Absolutely none of Intel's Optane parts (including the $3000+ enterprise drives) include large capacitors for power loss prevention.

BUT: EVERY Optane product on the market now including the consumer drive Phoronix tested and even the cheap 16GB cache drives provides power loss protection.

That's because none of these drives use a RAM cache at all and the data are stored fast enough that PLP is an inherent feature of the drive that doesn't need extra circuitry.

[hontvari]

You did not mention whether it has power loss protection capacitors. A few years ago they only put it into enterprise ssds. If it has not, then for me it is a dime a dozen. I can as well write my data to /dev/null, which is even faster. It would be good for a gaming machine, or anything which can be restored easily, but for me it is too expensive for that.

[starshipeleven]

ah, yissss, this is what we were expecting from Optane, not the cache thingy.

Price is ok for what it is.

[Otus]

Why the 4k block size with sequential tests? These drives should get much closer to their advertised rates with a larger block size. And real world sequential loads can take advantage of that.

[chuckula]

By the way, these results are stunning enough but it turns out that Optane may actually be held back in some OS configurations because the drives are so fast that the service time for DMA interrupts actually bottlenecks the drive performance in some low queue depth situations. PC Perspective saw that issue under Windows in its review where they actually boosted performance by going back to polling since the drive was so fast that the data was almost always available during the polling loops.

Linux may be more efficient in this regard with handling the DMA interrupts, but testing polled-I/O could be an interesting idea just to see if it's also an issue under Linux.

This presentation from earlier this year addresses the use of polled I/O in Linux for accessing high-speed non-volatile RAM devices like 3D XPoint and faster flash memory: http://events.linuxfoundation.org/si...17-final_0.pdf

[andyprough]

Holy Cow. Intel just broke PTS.