3d crosspoint or as Intel prefers to call it probably
for sex appeal reasons octane now we had
a hands-on look at this technology back in april with these tiny low capacity
models that were designed to make a hard drive that they accompanied performed
more like a traditional SSD and it worked pretty well so since then we've
been itching to get our hands on one of the full fat obtained drives that Intel
has been promising for years and get our
hands on one we did but what does the real-world performance of a storage
medium whose raw performance is claimed
to be up to a thousand times faster than
man flash look like well let's find out
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the octane 900p is a four lane PCI
Express 3.0 card with an all-metal heatsink and an easily removable
backplate that's full of helpful information about the drive on a sticker
but what's more interesting is actually what's underneath so here we see our
first indication that there is more to this card than just a PCI Express 2 m
dot 2 converter board like you might expect then when we flip it over and
gently spudge off the heatsink proper it reveals more of the same this is
absolutely a purpose-built card and the
comparably immense cooler and beefy
onboard processor should tell you this SSD means business which is kind of
strange considering the star citizen promo on the box now you can learn more
about obtained here but for now the TL
DR is this the exact details of obtains
arrangement are a trade secret but the
end result is a storage latency of a
theoretical thousand times faster than traditional mend making it only 10 times
slower than in that sense then D RAM so
while Intel's rated sequential read and write speeds don't even get us fast as a
fast SSD like a samsung 960 pro it
handles significantly more operations per second with seven times the write
endurance on this consumer product and a mind splitting
34 times the write endurance for the
data center oriented obtain P 4800 X
making the finite lifespans of NAND
based products a concern that we can bury in the past so the high-end video
editors and data scientists out there are salivating right now because this
kind of speed and endurance makes these larger drives amazing for use as scratch
disks as for what that means for gamers
well Intel says that load times will be
significantly reduced and
suddenly that star citizen promo makes more sense because this game recommends
a 200 gig SSD
so to test this thing we need a CPU and
a platform capable of taking full advantage of it we chose our x2 99 bench
with a mix of synthetic and real-world benchmarks our SSDs by the way were
secured raced in preparation for testing in Crystal disc mark we see more or less
as advertised speeds across our drives with octane scoring quite a bit higher
on the 4k randoms at a queue depth of 1 than the others hinting at its
capability for much higher responsiveness moving on to performance
tests we can see that octane managed much more consistent latency that edges
closer to but not quite RAM disk levels
of responsiveness this is super
impressive and it's at this point then that we wondered whether or not obtained
would make a difference for some of the heavy tasks that we deal with around the
office like editing 8k red video footage
and premiere or rendering with SolidWorks but as it turns out no no it
does not SolidWorks finished its i/o test about 4 seconds faster on obtain so
loading or saving would be your primary benefit here unless you run out of RAM
during a simulation that could be a very different story and as for premiere well
in a gigantic surprise to no one it is
so poorly optimized for this that when
we simulated a low memory situation with a 24 gig RAM drive it just choked no
matter which drive we had our swap file or the footage on so then we secure
erase the drives again and copied over our Steam library to see if we could
spot any differences in game load times which unfortunately due to the massive
install sizes of many modern games means that we say goodbye to our RAM disk in
our testing from here on out rebooting between runs we ended up with well
honestly pretty underwhelming results
compared to the samsung 960 Pro biggest Delta between them was only a
little over half a second and even our aging Kingston KC 400 and fashioned SATA
SSD really doesn't do poorly here though
this is another non surprise to people who pay closer attention to benchmarks
than they do to marketing one last secure race and an install of Ubuntu
later our final test is Houdini a piece of software by side effects that handles
physics simulations for the high end rendering used by big blockbuster film
and game companies our test file will be a rendering of a maelstrom that has 1.1
billion particles interacting with each other so just one frame is gonna eat our
RAM for breakfast meaning that our RAM disk again is not coming back as for the
rest well to generate 8 frames our 960
Pro Kover an hour of i/o thrashing while
our obtain killed it in just under 29
minutes as for the KC 400 while we gave
it a participation trophy so then should you go out and spend $600 on an only 480
gig octane drive if you're a normal user I'm gonna come right out and say no
because the chances are pretty slim that you would ever notice a difference
compared to a traditional NVMe SSD and
even a SATA one is probably fine for you in most cases as for heavier workloads
well maybe if you must have the best of the
best but I'm gonna come out and tell you again that you are not going to feel a
difference like you did when you went from a hard drive to a conventional SSD
it's not like that with that said if you
have a real workload that can benefit from obtains versatility as not just
hyper fast storage like running many
virtual machines off of a single Drive but also its low latency and lower cost
compared to system memory where you can use it as an overflow for your RAM like
in our Maelstrom demo well then while
the price of entry is steep the benefits may just outweigh the costs
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