OPTANE 8 SSD
Intel’s budget 3D XPoint SSD hits the labs
TEN TIMES THE DATA DENSITY, 1,000 times faster, 1,000 times better endurance. All of this and more Intel claimed three years ago for its revolutionary 3D XPoint non-volatile memory technology, now branded Optane. Those claims, of course, were made in comparison to the incumbent non-volatile memory tech that dominates the storage industry, namely NAND flash memory.
Now we have our hands on Intel’s first more-or-less mainstream SSD for PCs based on that 3D XPoint tech, the Intel Optane SSD 800p. But what’s this? Sequential reads of 1,450MB/s? Writes of just 640MB/s? And check out the IOPS, too. Intel rates its new Optane drive at just 250K read IOPS and 140K for writes. Far from being 1,000 times faster than a NAND SSD, all those figures are significantly slower. What’s going on?
The short answer is that it’s complicated. But before we go for the full debrief, let’s square away the rest of the new 800p’s specs. At launch, it’s only available in two configurations: 58GB and 118GB. Launch pricing is $129 for the smaller drive and $199 for the 118GB drive tested here (which formats down to 110GB). Expensive, small, and slow, you may be thinking. It’s not quite that simple, but hold those thoughts.
In many of our benchmarks, the 800p is indeed unremarkable by conventional SSD standards, and a major letdown given the hype that initially accompanied 3D XPoint. Sequential throughput is pretty much in line with Intel’s claims, and thus miles off the fastest NAND-based SSDs.
Granted, Intel has gone with a dual-lane PCI Express interface for the 800p, which puts a cap on peak transfer performance compared to high-end NAND drives with quad-lane interfaces, but that’s clearly not what is holding back the 800p’s sequential write performance, which clocks in at a maximum of 650MB/s in ATTO Disk Benchmark. That’s barely any faster than a SATA SSD. CRYSTAL CLEAR However, CrystalDiskMark’s 4K random access metrics hint at the 800p’s greater potential. The 800p registers 229MB/s for reads and 176MB/s for writes. Those figures are substantially faster than the current gold standard among NAND SSDs, the Samsung 960 Pro, can muster. Broadly speaking, then, the focus for this drive is on low latency and low queue-depth performance, not peak throughput.
More specifically, Intel says that the 800p is four to five times faster to respond at short queue depths of one and two compared to a NAND-based SSD. Meanwhile, it’s at much deeper queue depths of up to 32 where those NAND drives deliver their fastest 4K random access performance. What’s more, Intel reckons it’s those shorter queue depths that most determine the performance of typical client PC workloads. Intel also says performance is maintained regardless of how full the drive is, and rates the 800p for 365TB of writes, which is incredibly high for such a small drive.
All told, the new Intel Optane SSD 800p is a bit of a mixed bag. The limited capacity means that even the larger of the two available drives is marginal as a boot drive. It’s also disappointing to see a drive based on such a supposedly revolutionary memory technology deliver such mediocre performance by some measures. The consequence is that the upsides of this new technology will have to be qualified, for now. This is, very likely, the most responsive mainstream SSD you can buy. It’s also quite possibly the most robust. But it’s not the fastest all around.
The extent to which this disappoints probably depends on how much you bought into the 3D XPoint hype. Realistically, it was never likely to completely deliver on the bombastic claims, and even less likely to do so from the get-go. Certainly, it isn’t as immediately revolutionary as we were hoping. Of course, 3D XPoint could well still be the future of PC storage, but for now, it feels like a beta technology, albeit one that has us rethinking what is important in a solid-state drive, and how its performance should be measured.