Intel Optane SSD 900P Offers Stunning Linux Performance

[kieffer]

This looks very interesting. I just benchmarked a full application with a P3700 server SSD from Intel and this SSD is still the bottleneck for my application with an average of 4ms for reading 2.5MB files (multi-threaded) that's only 625MB/s.
The P3700 could not sustain the speed if the dataset is larger than its internal cache of 1GB. As the P900 has no cache, it may be a "better" candidate.

[edwaleni]

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.

Yep, this is what I don't like about the U.2 format. Most consumer boards use M.2 and they want you to use these M.2 to U.2 PCIe extenders which are somewhat inflexible and thick to keep RFI down.

To me, U.2 is for the datacenter folks where server board makers build dedicated PCIe ribbons up to their drive cages, and then a walk by tech can see the drive status and swap where needed.

I think the whole M.2/U.2 format is a total boondoggle ripe for a replacement. Extending 4x PCIe directly into the storage space is great, but just not in this manner.

Hopefully someone will come out with a PCIe x8/x16 card or planar connector that can ribbon up to a multi-drive bay more easily and not cause hum into every radio for 300m.