Intel Optane SSD 900P Offers Stunning Linux Performance

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[eva2000]

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

[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.

[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.

[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..

[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.

[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...