Intel Optane SSD 900P Offers Stunning Linux Performance

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel Optane SSD 900P Offers Stunning Linux Performance

At the end of October Intel released the Optane 900P solid-state drive as their new ultra high-end performance SSD. Windows reviews have been positive, but what about using the Optane 900P on Linux? It's working well and delivers stunning NVMe SSD performance.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=25541

[chuckula]

First is our common and basic SQLite benchmark for this embedded database... Yes, you don't see the Optane 900P in there because it ran too fast! Carrying out all the queries was too quick and the program returned before the Phoronix Test Suite could get an automated accurate measurement, it was less than one second. Very impressive compared to the other results...

And that right there is why Intel is pushing Optane so aggressively in the enterprise and now the high-end consumer market. They want to break benchmarks!

[andyprough]

Holy Cow. Intel just broke PTS.

[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

[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.

[starshipeleven]

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

Price is ok for what it is.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.