Intel Optane SSD 900P Offers Stunning Linux Performance

[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.

[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.

[boxie]

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.

Not unless you go out and get a shiny new server with 8, 16 or 24 U.2 HDD bays... and, if you are going to build a large home nas using SSD, the 1t and 2t samsung evo drives are much cheaper atm and I would think you would be hard pressed to stress them enough

[caligula]

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.

This is something I also don't get. No offence but the Samsung drives Michael uses in the tests are already two years old. I've had 960 EVO for almost a year now.. Of course a new drive seems fast compared to legacy hardware. Even Core i3 is fast compared to Commodore 64..

[Zan Lynx]

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.

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.

[Michael]

This is something I also don't get. No offence but the Samsung drives Michael uses in the tests are already two years old. I've had 960 EVO for almost a year now.. Of course a new drive seems fast compared to legacy hardware. Even Core i3 is fast compared to Commodore 64..

My 960 EVO died after ~1 month and the Samsung RMA process still hasn't accepted its return....

[torsionbar28]

Ho hum maybe one day I'll replace my WD RE hard drives with the new solid state stuff.

[AndyChow]

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.

I can't seem to find any. I've seen quad M.2 pcie cards, but not U.2. If you could PM me a link for a quad U.2 card, I'd appreciate it.

Not unless you go out and get a shiny new server with 8, 16 or 24 U.2 HDD bays... and, if you are going to build a large home nas using SSD, the 1t and 2t samsung evo drives are much cheaper atm and I would think you would be hard pressed to stress them enough

I wouldn't use it for a NAS, but some transaction heavy things I do would definitely benefit from low latency. SSD get real slow sometimes. Even the 960 EVO drops to reads of 100 MB/s when you are doing a lot of random reads and have a low queue depth, which happens a lot if you are working with large datasets as a single user. TBH, I could do all that with a single one of these, and then backup to a redundant array when I'm done playing around. My comment was mostly about the M.2, Ultra M.2, U.2, Sata-express, Optane DIMM, and whatever else there probably is. There are too many "standards". Some take up PCIe lanes, some don't, and it's a total mess, IMO.

[MaxToTheMax]

I was going to budget for 64-128 GiB of RAM for my next build, but I think I'll do 32-64 GiB plus an Optane swap disk-- would cost less than a lot of the 128 GiB RAM kits out there and would probably be fast enough. This is a big statement coming from me, since I haven't used swap since about 2009, but it looks like the economics of storage vs RAM have made swap worth using again.

Michael-- would appreciate benchmarks comparing a large-memory configuration vs. Optane swap, if you have any suitable memory performance benchmarks in PTS.

[pal666]

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.

lol, buy ups