It's taken a while but at last we have been able to get hands on with Intel's Optane SSD 900P drive, another that uses Intel's 3D XPoint technology and is aimed at the high-performance desktop and workstations market segments, although these days the line between the two is a lot blurrier than it ever has been. The Intel Optane SSD 900P comes in just two capacities, 280GB and 480GB. The 280GB drive is a 2.5in 15mm unit using an U.2 interface while the 480GB drive uses a HHHL (Half Height Half Length) AIC form factor. Looking after the 3D XPoint memory is Intel's home grown seven-channel controller. Intel's official figures for the 480GB version of the Optane 900p are up to 2,500MB/s for Sequential reads and up to 2,000MB/s for Sequential writes. 4K Random performance is up to 550,000 IOPs for reads with writes at up to 500,000 IOPS. Power figures for the drive are 5W when idle with active ratings of 13W for writes, 8W for reads and 14W for burst speeds. The quoted endurance for the 480GB model is a mind blowing 8.76PB written – yes that is petabytes, not the usual terabytes! To put it another way, you can write 5TB of data to the drive every day for the entire length of Intel’s 5-year warranty. Physical Specifications: Usable Capacities: 480GB. NAND Components: Intel 3D XPoint. NAND Controller: Intel 7-channel. Interface: PCIe NVMe 3.0 x4. Form Factor: HHHL (Half Height Half Length) AIC. Dimensions: 68.9 x 17.2 x 168mm. Drive Weight: 230g. Firmware Version: 0325 The Intel Optane SSD 900P 480GB ships in a sturdy, stylish box with a label on the front face, showing the capacity. The rear of the box has an image of the drive and a list of what’s in the box. Inside the box there is plenty of protection for the drive as it sits snugly surrounded by dense foam. Also in the box is a shorter length PCIe bracket to use the drive in more compact cases, along with a combined installation instruction/warranty booklet. The front of PCB is completely covered by a passive heatsink while the rear is covered by a metal plate. The PCIe bracket of the drive has a neat grill cut into it which matches the curve of the heatsink. The rear of the heatsink is open to help heat to dissipate away from the drive. We didn't want to upset the thermal properties of the drive too much so we only removed the rear plate from the drive. With the backplate off you can see 14 of the 28 packages of 3D XPoint memory the 480GB Optane uses. The other side of the PCB has the remainder of the NAND and the Intel SLL3D 7-channel controller. The Intel Toolbox SSD management utility is a pretty comprehensive tool for looking after your SSD. The home screen displays information about the drive, how the capacity is being used, its health and estimated life remaining. There are seven buttons on the right hand side of the utility main screen. These are for Intel’s SSD Optimiser, two drive diagnostic scans, one quick / the other full, secure erase, firmware updates, a system tuner and a page for system information. For testing, the drives are all wiped and reset to factory settings by HDDerase V4. We try to use free or easily available programs and some real world testing so you can compare our findings against your own system. This is a good way to measure potential upgrade benefits. Main system: Intel Core i7-7700K with 16GB of DDR4-3200 RAM, Sapphire R9 390 Nitro and an Asus Prime Z270-A motherboard. Other drives: Corsair Force MP500 480GB Corsair Force MP510 960GB Intel Optane SSD905P 480GB Intel SSD760p 512GB Kingston A1000 480GB Plextor M9Pe(Y) 512GB Plextor M8PeG 512GB PNY CS2030 240GB Samsung SSD970 EVO 2TB Samsung SSD970 PRO 1TB Samsung SSD960 PRO 2TB Samsung SSD960 EVO 1TB Toshiba OCZ RD400 512GB Western Digital Black NVMe 1TB Western Digital Black PCIe 512GB Software: ATTO Disk Benchmark 3.5. CrystalDiskMark v6 ASSD v2.0 IOMeter. Futuremark PC Mark 8 All our results were achieved by running each test five times with every configuration this ensures that any glitches are removed from the results. Trim is confirmed as running by typing fsutil behaviour query disabledeletenotify into the command line. A response of disabledeletenotify =0 confirms TRIM is active. CrystalDiskMark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSDs. We are using v6.0. Intel's Optane 900P is a strong performer in the CrystalDiskMark benchmark at both deep and shallow queue depths. At a QD of 32 it's the second fastest consumer drive we've tested to date, while at a QD of 1 it tops the chart, with just slightly faster read and write scores than Intel's Optane SSD 905P. Looking at the two benchmark result screens it's clear that the Intel controller isn't fussed which type of data it's being asked to deal with. The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage. We are using version 3.5 for our NVMe disk tests. Intel's official Sequential figures for the 480GB 900P are up to 2,500MB/s for reads and up to 2,000MB/s for writes. Using the ATTO benchmark we could confirm these numbers with the tested drive producing 2,543MB/s for reads and 2,039MB/s for writes. AS SSD is a great free tool designed just for benching Solid State Drives. It performs an array of sequential read and write tests, as well as random read and write tests with sequential access times over a portion of the drive. AS SSD includes a sub suite of benchmarks with various file pattern algorithms but this is difficult in trying to judge accurate performance figures. In the AS SSD benchmark, it's an Intel one & two with the 900P tying with the 905P at the top of the chart, both having the identical read/write scores. IOMeter is another open source synthetic benchmarking tool which is able to simulate the various loads placed on hard drive and solid state drive technology. There are many ways to measure the IOPS performance of a Solid State Drive, so our results will sometimes differ from manufacturer’s quoted ratings. We do test all drives in exactly the same way, so the results are directly comparable. We test 128KB Sequential read and write and random read and write 4k tests. The test setup’s for the tests are listed below. Each is run five times. 128KB Sequential Read / Write. Transfer Request Size: 128KB Span: 8GB Thread(s): 1, Outstanding I/O: 1-32 Test Run: 20 minutes per test 4K Sustained Random Read / Write. Transfer Request Size: 4KB Span: 80GB Thread(s): 4, Outstanding I/O: 1-32 Test Run: 20 minutes per test 4K Random 70/30 mix Read/Write. Transfer Request Size: 4KB Span: 80GB Reads: 70% Writes: 30% Thread(s): 4 Outstanding I/O: 2 – 32 Test Run: 20 minutes 128KB Sequential Read / Write As with the ATTO benchmark results we could confirm and even better Intel's official Sequential figures for the drive of up to 2,500MB/s for reads and 2,000MB/s for writes with our Sequential tests - the drive producing 2,714MB/s for reads and 2,342.56MB/s for writes. 128KB Sequential Read Compared Thanks to its 3D XPoint memory and just like the 905P, the 900P's Sequential read performance isn't its strong point. 128KB Sequential Write Compared Just as with Sequential reads, the Sequential write performance of the 900P certainly doesn't break any records. 4K Sustained Random Read The official random 4K read figure for the SSD 900P is up to 550,000 IOPs and although we couldn't reach that maximum figure with our tests, the tested 4K read result of 520,584 IOPS is still in the same ballpark. Intel's 3D XPoint memory is all about producing very high random read performance at low queue depths, where most of the everyday workloads occurs. As you can see from the queue depth result charts, it certainly achieves that aim. 4K Sustained Random Write The official 4K random write performance figures is up to 500,000 IOPS. With our 4K random write tests we fell quite some distance from that maximum figure, the tested drive producing some 423,587 IOPS. The Optane 900P's random write performance isn't as impressive as the read, regardless of queue depth. 4K Random 70 Read / 30 Write The drive produced strong performance throughout the queue depth range in our mixed read/write test. In our read throughput test, the drive peaked at the 4MB block size, with the 2,474.47MB/s figure just shy of the maximum official figure of 2,500MB/s. In the write throughput test, the drive peaked at the 8MB block size at 2,079.93MB/s before dropping back to finish the test run at 2,074.84MB/s - both figures being a little better than the official Intel figure of 2,000MB/s. Futuremark’s PCMark 8 is a very good all round system benchmark but it’s Storage Consistency Test takes it to whole new level when testing SSD drives. It runs through four phases; Preconditioning, Degradation, Steady State, Recovery and finally Clean Up. During the Degradation, Steady State and Recovery phases it runs performance tests using the 10 software programs that form the backbone of PCMark 8; Adobe After Effects, Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop Heavy and Photoshop Light, Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, Word, Battlefield 3 and World of Warcraft. With some 18 phases of testing, this test can take many hours to run. Preconditioning The drive is written sequentially through up to the reported capacity with random data, write size of 256 × 512 = 131,072 bytes. This is done twice. Degradation Run writes of random size between 8 × 512 and 2048 × 512 bytes on random offsets for 10 minutes. It then runs a performance test. These two actions are then repeated 8 times and on each pass the duration of random writes is increased by 5 minutes. Steady State Run writes of random size between 8 × 512 and 2048 × 512 bytes on random offsets for final duration achieved in degradation phase. A performance test is then run. These actions are then re-run five times. Recovery The drive is idled for 5 minutes. Then a performance test is run. These actions are then repeated five times. Clean Up The drive is written through sequentially up to the reported capacity with zero data, write size of 256 × 512 = 131,072 bytes. For PCMark 8's Consistency benchmark, the overall performance is stunning. The most surprising thing about the overall results is that the only time the performance really starts to drop is, oddly, during the recovery stages. PCMark 8’s Consistency test provides a huge amount of performance data, so here we’ve looked a little closer at how the Intel Optane SSD 900P performs in each of the benchmarks test suites. Adobe Creative Cloud You won't often, if hardly ever, see results in the Adobe CC test runs looking like this. The drive loses hardly any performance during the most intensive parts of the tests. The only drop in performance for all five test traces comes during the recovery phases. Microsoft Office As with the Adobe tests, the Microsoft Office tests display amazingly consistent performance during the Degradation and SteadyState phases of the test run. As before, the drive loses performance during the recovery phases of the benchmark. Casual Gaming The casual gaming test shows exactly the same pattern as the other two test suites; strong and consistent performance during the intensive first two parts of the test run with the drive only showing signs of distress during the recovery phases. Just like the Consistency test, PCMark 8’s Standard Storage test also saves a large amount of performance data. The default test runs through the test suite of 10 applications three times. Here we show the total bandwidth performance for each of the individual test suites for the third and final benchmark run. In the standard PCMark 8 storage test runs, the drive produces very strong performance - to say the least - for all of the test traces. For the long term performance stability test, we set the drive up to run a 20-minute 4K random test with a 30% write, 70% read split, at a Queue Depth of 256 over the entire disk. The Optane 900p averaged 140,055 IOPS for the test with a performance stability of 98.6% which is enterprise standard and exceptional for a drive aimed at the high-end desktop/workstation market segment. To test real life performance of a drive we use a mix of folder/file types and by using the FastCopy utility (which gives a time as well as MB/s result) we record the performance of drive reading from & writing to a 256GB Samsung SSD850 PRO. We test using the following folder/file types: 100GB data file. 60GB ISO image. 60GB Steam folder – 29,521 files. 50GB File folder – 28,523 files. 12GB Movie folder – 24 files (mix of Blu-ray and 4K files). 10GB Photo folder – 621 files (mix of png, raw and jpeg images). 10GB Audio folder – 1,483 files (mix of mp3 and .flac files). 5GB (1.5bn pixel) photo. The drive is much happier dealing with the larger file sizes in our real life file transfer tests. To get a measure of how much faster PCIe NVMe drives are than standard SATA SSDs we use the same files but transfer to and from a 512GB Toshiba OCZ RD400. Transferring files between the SSD 900P and another NVMe drive shows the drive's potential, especially when it comes to moving around larger sized files. The Optane 900p is basically the consumer equivalent of the enterprise-focused Optane P4800X, aimed at high-end desktop and workstation usage. It has been designed to deliver consistently high random performance, particularly reads, at very low queue depths (QD1 – QD4) and at low latencies thanks to its 3D XPoint memory. The focus on these queue depth ranges is because they are where the vast majority of workload activity occurs in everyday usage. So if the drive is focused on offering high random performance, what's the Sequential performance like? Well, it isn't earth shattering that's for sure. Intel quote Sequential reads as up to 2,500MB/s for the 480GB drive with writes rated as up to 2,000MB/s, both of these figures place the drive a long down the results graph for our ATTO benchmark tests. We did manage to squeeze a wee bit more out of the drive under testing, however, with 2,543MB/s for reads and 2,039MB/s for writes. That being said, the random performance especially reads is very, very impressive. Intel's official figures for the drive are up to 550,000 IOPs for reads and up to 500,000 IOPS for writes. We couldn't quite match those numbers with our 4K random tests with reads coming out at 520,584 IOPS and writes at 423,587. But a look at our results graphs shows just how good the drive is at low queue depths when it comes to random read performance. It tops the graphs at QD 1, 2 and 4 - with the only other drive coming close to it being the Optane SSD 905P that uses the same 3D XPoint memory. What is somewhat surprising is that the drive also tops the QD32 chart, knocking the longtime king of the hill, Samsung's SSD 970 PRO, into second place. The drive's performance stability is also impressive. In our long term performance stability test the drive averaged 140,055 IOPS with a performance stability of 98.6%, a figure that is usually the domain of enterprise focused drives. When it comes to the drive's endurance, forget about a TB TBW figure, the SSD 900P’s endurance figure is quoted in petabytes - 8.76PB to be exact, which works out to be around a massive 5TB of writes every day for the length of the 5-year warranty. It's a mind boggling figure for a drive aimed at the high-end desktop/workstation segment. We found the 480GB Optane 900P on Ebuyer for £535.98 HERE. Pros Random 4K read performance at low queue depths. Endurance. Performance stability. Cons Expensive. Sequential performance not as strong as the random performance. KitGuru says: Just like the Optane 905P we reviewed recently, Intel’s Optane SSD 900P offers exceptional random read performance at low queue depths and has incredible endurance - but it also comes with a very high price tag for its capacity.
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