Intel Optane SSD 905P Series are the fastest SSDs ever

[HEXUS]

Intel is making these drives in PCIe slot and U.2 formats, available in capacities up to 960GB.

Read more.

[Ozaron]

Ah, I can't help but wonder how the combined read/write and IOPS of the (roughly 25) WD Blue 1TB 7200RPM drives you could buy for the same price, compare against this 960GB model. Assuming you could RAID them properly.

[3dcandy]

Ah, I can't help but wonder how the combined read/write and IOPS of the (roughly 25) WD Blue 1TB 7200RPM drives you could buy for the same price, compare against this 960GB model. Assuming you could RAID them properly.

and the mahoosive waste of power....

[DanceswithUnix]

Ah, I can't help but wonder how the combined read/write and IOPS of the (roughly 25) WD Blue 1TB 7200RPM drives you could buy for the same price, compare against this 960GB model. Assuming you could RAID them properly.

I think that is key. The only people I have come across who really care about IOPS are running a VM farm and will want rather more than 960GB. A tray of SSDs gets you performance, capacity and redundancy.

You won't ever get good IOPS out of spinning rust though.

[3dcandy]

I think that is key. The only people I have come across who really care about IOPS are running a VM farm and will want rather more than 960GB. A tray of SSDs gets you performance, capacity and redundancy.

You won't ever get good IOPS out of spinning rust though.

I'd love the iops man...but not after I lose a body part to afford them

[Millennium]

It's an interesting product and compact and certainly performant but it's completely overpriced, even in dollars. I kinda would like one but I'm holding off and nursing my 850 EVO's data limit @ 500 ish GB.

I am happy to see the innovation but unhappy at Intel's seemingly complete lack of regard for value and seemingly BLIND goal to just make returns for equity partners or shareholders. Intel made such a bad mistake recently with no real excuse I may just never buy an Intel product|item again.

Let's see. I'll be here on Hexus posting.

[Xlucine]

This isn't a consumer drive, it's not for consumer workloads. In practice for consumer workloads (game loading times etc) there's barely a fag paper between SATA & the fastest NVME SSDs, so this will perform identically to any other SSD on the market. Some server workloads need the IOPS this can offer, probably, but for everyone else you'd probably get more enjoyment from buying a SATA SSD and just burning the money you saved

[Moby-Dick]

Ah, I can't help but wonder how the combined read/write and IOPS of the (roughly 25) WD Blue 1TB 7200RPM drives you could buy for the same price, compare against this 960GB model. Assuming you could RAID them properly.

Sata drives generally do 75-100 IOPS per spindle , so with an appropriate workload , you might see 2,500 IOPS , still 200 times less than the SSD


As mentioned , these are most likely to see action in a more enterprise workload - either as a caching tier for a hybrid storage array ( or HCI setup ) or as a dedicated volume for certain parts of a high performance workload. The company I work for had access to some early Optane samples , but we didn't really see that much of a performance boost over a good NVMe SSD ( like a P4600 ) - it just shifts the bottleneck.

[DanceswithUnix]

This isn't a consumer drive, it's not for consumer workloads.

I'm struggling to come up with a server workload that would benefit from one of these.

From the random 4K read graph you get about 4 times the performance of a normal 1TB SSD for 6 times the price? So buy a raid stripe of 2.5in SSDs.

[FRISH]

I am happy to see the innovation but unhappy at Intel's seemingly complete lack of regard for value and seemingly BLIND goal to just make returns for equity partners or shareholders.

It's not like SSDs weren't absurdly expensive when they first came out. It's new, expensive and they have costs to make up for. Hopefully in time it will fall more so that it will be more viable for consumers. I'm particularly interested in the increased durability. Something I feel SSDs and HDDs don't really deliver.

[kingpotnoodle]

I'm struggling to come up with a server workload that would benefit from one of these.

From the random 4K read graph you get about 4 times the performance of a normal 1TB SSD for 6 times the price? So buy a raid stripe of 2.5in SSDs.

Optane drives are excellent as cache drives or tiered storage with cheaper SSDs, I've had some good results with Ceph.

I've been expecting (but still waiting) to see hardware RAID cards using Optane for the cache, potentially nearly as fast as DRAM without needing a backup battery and better latency than NAND.

[Ttaskmaster]

$1200 is a lot of money for an RGB light stick in a PCI-e slot... Intel making marketing blunders, I assume?

[DanceswithUnix]

I'm particularly interested in the increased durability. Something I feel SSDs and HDDs don't really deliver.

SSD durability hasn't been an issue for years. The increases in capacity has helped, spreading the wear over lots more flash.

Optane drives are excellent as cache drives or tiered storage with cheaper SSDs, I've had some good results with Ceph.

I've been expecting (but still waiting) to see hardware RAID cards using Optane for the cache, potentially nearly as fast as DRAM without needing a backup battery and better latency than NAND.

... and with my next breath I have to say that if Intel had managed the durability they originally claimed then that might be a flyer, but with the very much reduced durability their actual products get I don't think you can get a datacenter friendly 5 year lifespan if you are writing to the stuff constantly as a cache medium.

[Iota]

it just shifts the bottleneck.

I think this is something people tend to overlook when going "oooh shiny". If the bottleneck isn't the storage, then there would be little gained from buying one of these (if you even have the use case scenario requiring one).

[Moby-Dick]

SSD durability hasn't been an issue for years. The increases in capacity has helped, spreading the wear over lots more flash.
... and with my next breath I have to say that if Intel had managed the durability they originally claimed then that might be a flyer, but with the very much reduced durability their actual products get I don't think you can get a datacenter friendly 5 year lifespan if you are writing to the stuff constantly as a cache medium.

We generally recommend customer use the high endurance devices for our cache layer - Generally in the 10DWPD range , though the optane devices seem to be rated for a huge endurance ( up to 30DWPD or 41Petabytes Written over a 5 year period! ) The only time see SSD's go pop is when they have cheaped out and bought a read intensive SSD for it ( one of the reasons we mirror our cache drives so that you can swap them out should the wear level get a bit high )

[badass]

I'm struggling to come up with a server workload that would benefit from one of these.

From the random 4K read graph you get about 4 times the performance of a normal 1TB SSD for 6 times the price? So buy a raid stripe of 2.5in SSDs.

That's understandable. The only scenario is they type where a customer has a database too large to fit in memory but needs the performance so uses a few of these to get better than SSD performance.

Pretty niche I know.