The Intel Optane SSD 800p (58GB & 118GB) Review: Almost The Right Size
by Billy Tallis on March 8, 2018 5:15 PM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy
Our Heavy storage benchmark is proportionally more write-heavy than The Destroyer, but much shorter overall. The total writes in the Heavy test aren't enough to fill the drive, so performance never drops down to steady state. This test is far more representative of a power user's day to day usage, and is heavily influenced by the drive's peak performance. The Heavy workload test details can be found here. This test is run twice, once on a freshly erased drive and once after filling the drive with sequential writes.
As with The Destroyer, the average data rate of the Intel Optane SSD 800p puts it near the top of the rankings, but behind the fastest flash-based SSDs and the Optane 900p. Intel's VROC again adds overhead that isn't worthwhile without the high queue depths of synthetic benchmarks.
The average and 99th percentile latencies of the Optane SSD 800p on the Heavy test are better than any of the low-end NVMe SSDs, but it is only in RAID that the latency drops down to the level of the best flash-based SSDs and the 900p.
The average read latency of the Optane SSD 800p ranks second behind the 900p. VROC adds enough overhead that the RAID configurations end up having slightly higher average read latencies than the Samsung 960 PRO. For the average write latencies, VROC is far more useful, and helps the 800p make up for the lack of a write cache.
The 99th percentile read and write latencies of the 800p RAID configurations are on par with the 900p, but the individual drives have slightly worse QoS than the Samsung 960 PRO.
The 800p again leads in energy usage thanks to its high overall performance without the high baseline power consumption of the 900p. The budget NVMe SSDs all use at least twice as much energy over the course of the test, and the Samsung 960 PRO is closer to the budget drives than to the 800p.
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Reflex - Saturday, March 10, 2018 - link
I also think people forget how crappy & expensive gen1 and 2 SSD's were.Drazick - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
We really need those in U2 / SATA Express form.Desktop users shouldn't use M2 with all its thermal limitations.
jabber - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
Whichever connector you use or whatever the thermals, once you go above 600MBps the real world performance difference is very hard to tell in most cases. We just need SATA4 and we can dump all these U2/SATA Express sockets. M.2 for compactness and SATA4 for everything else non Enterprise. Done.Reflex - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
U2 essentially is next gen SATA. There is no SATA4 on the way. SATA is at this point an 18 year old specification ripe for retirement. There is also nothing wrong with M.2 even in desktops. Heat spreaders aren't a big deal in that scenario. All that's inside a SATA drive is the same board you'd see in M.2 form factor more or less.leexgx - Saturday, March 10, 2018 - link
apart from that your limited to 0-2 slots per board (most come with 6 SATA ports)i agree that a newer SATA that support NVME over it be nice but U2 be nice if anyone would adopt it and make the ports become standard and have U2 SSDs
jabber - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
I am amazed that no one has decided to just do the logical thing and slap a 64GB Flash cache in a 4TB+ HDD and be done with it. One unit and done.iter - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
They have, seagate has a hybrid drive, not all that great really.The reason is that caching algorithms suck. They are usually FIFO - first in first out, and don't take into account actual usage patterns. Meaning you get good performance only if your work is confined to a data set that doesn't exceed the cache. If you exceed it, it starts bringing in garbage, wearing down the flash over nothing. Go watch a movie, that you are only gonna watch once - it will cache that, because you accessed it. And now you have gigabytes of pointless writes to the cache, displacing data that actually made sense to be cached.
Which is why I personally prefer to have separate drives rather than cache. Because I know what can benefit from flash and what makes no sense there. Automatic tiering is pathetic, even in crazy expensive enterprise software.
jabber - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
Yeah I was using SSHD drives when they first came out but 8GB of flash doesn't really cut it. I'm sure after all this time 64GB costs the same as 8GB did back then (plus it would be space enough for several apps and data sets to be retained) and the algorithms will have improved. If Intel thinks caches for HDDs have legs then why not just combine them in one simple package?wumpus - Friday, March 9, 2018 - link
Presumably, there's no market. People who buy spinning rust are either buying capacity (for media, and using SSD for the rest) or cheaping out and not buying SSDs.What surprises me is that drives still include 64MB of DRAM, you would think that companies who bothered to make these drives would have switched to TLC (and pseudo-SLC) for their buffer/caches (writing on power off must be a pain). Good luck finding someone who would pay for the difference.
Intel managed to shove this tech into the chipsets (presumably a software driver that looked for the hardware flag, similar to RAID) in 2011-2012, but apparently dropped that soon afterward. Too bad, reserving 64GB of flash to cache a harddrive (no idea if you could do this with a RAID array) sounds like something that is still usefull (not that you need the performance, just that the flash is so cheap). Just make sure the cache is set to "write through" [if this kills performance it shouldn't be on rust] to avoid doubling your chances of drive loss. Apparently the support costs weren't worth the bother.
leexgx - Saturday, March 10, 2018 - link
8GB should be plenty for SSHD and there currant generation have cache evic protection (witch i think is 3rd gen) so say a LBA block is read 10 times it will assume that is something you open often or its a system file or a startup item, so 2-3GB of data will not get removed easily (so windows, office, browsers and other startup items will always be in the nand cache) the rest of the caching is dynamic if its had more then 2-4 reads it caches it to the nandthe current generation SSHDs by seagate (don't know how others do it) its split into 3 sections so has a easy, bit harder and very hard to evict from read cache, as the first gen SSHDs from seagate just defragmenting the drive would end evicting your normal used stuff as any 2 reads would be cached right away that does not happen any more
if you expect it to make your games load faster you need to look elsewhere, as they are meant to boost commonly used applications and OS and on startup programs but still have the space for storage
that said i really dislike HDDs as boot drives if they did not cost £55 for a 250gb SSD i put them in for free