SSDs are finally at the point where their costs have fallen and their
capacities are so high that they are
truly a replacement for the hard drives
of your which raises the question then what of
the heck was Intel thinking releasing
expensive 58 and
118 Gigabyte SSDs for performance
enthusiasts in the year 2018 I'm gonna
level with you we're still not sure but we're gonna
walk you through what we do know about the Intel octane SSD 800 P
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so just like it's smaller accelerator
siblings the opt-in 800 P comes in a standard m dot two form factor which
allows it to work as either a normal storage drive in any machine with NVMe
or this is unofficial though in supported systems as an accelerator for
your hard drive the caveat at this time
though is that it only does that on your boot drive so as
enthusiasts around here anyway we would really like to see more flexibility in
the future for our applications like booting off of an SSD like a normal one
and then using a large octane module to accelerate maybe like a gigantic steam
library on a high-capacity secondary drive of course until isn't marketing
the 800 P as an accelerator anyway but
that didn't stop us from feeling like we needed to ask
what are these things for them and their
response was kind of baffling they were like well you know we feel like 58 gigs
is big enough for a dedicated boot drive
and I mean yeah
technically you could install Windows 10 on 58 gigs but I mean you'd have spent a
hundred and thirty dollars on a storage solution by that point that wouldn't
even have enough additional space left over to store the hibernation file of a
high-end system with 32 gigs of RAM these days now a hundred and eighteen
gigs is obviously quite a bit better but
even then you're gonna have to be giving me a lot of performance to give up 3/4
of the capacity that I would get with a decent NAND based SATA SSD
so let's go ahead and fire it up shall we
so this is it this is the opt-in experience we are booted off our 118 gig
drive get some benchmarks fired up here shall
we so starting with crystal disk mark at a key depth of eight compared to a samsung
960 Pro we're getting slightly higher random reads and then significantly
inferior random writes but at Q depth
one obtains random read performance is over triple that's really impressive
given that this is closer to what most average users would be experiencing in
their day-to-day lives moving on to performance test op team
triples the speed of our Samsung and also has significantly lower latency
eight milliseconds is a full frame delay at 120 Hertz where our SATA SSD is over
two frames at sixty Hertz adding a Lucan
file copy in the background our op tain drive maintains its lead but not by
quite as much moving on to Microsoft Word our average scores put-up tay ninh
at just over a second lead in load times
with excel and powerpoint yielding smaller gains launching from obtain
though it should be noted that every configuration is fast enough for normal
people who don't launch ten documents at once Google Chrome launches marginally
faster while Adobe Premiere saw just under a second shaved off its load time
finally and this will be unsurprising if you saw our opt-in 900p video doom the
only big game that would comfortably fit on even our larger module was hardly
different at all okay so in spite of
using only two PCI Express Lanes versus
the four for the samsung 960 pro that we used as our benchmark NVMe drive the
octane 800 piece performances as the kids say think on fleek so maybe the
solution then to our capacity woes is
another one let's try running them in
raid zero alright then bippity Boppity
done now compared to a single drive the
numbers look pretty good in our synthetic tests with only slight
regressions at a key depth of one where raid really shines though is in the
responsiveness check that latency and
then even better check out the max latency while we have our file copy
running that's just over one frame at
240 Hertz set what I would consider to be an unreasonable load on a boot drive
unfortunately though we do see some regressions in most of our program
launch tests with the notable exception of Adobe premier which demonstrates what
Intel's been saying all along that obtained is not about raw throughput but
more about very low latency which is why you won't find how many megabytes per
second it does anywhere on the Box
bringing us then back to our original question maybe you can help us answer it
who is this for what is it for at a
hundred and thirty bucks for fifty eight gigs and 200 for a hundred and eighteen
gigs the pricing is not exactly
competitive it's too small for real
professional work or even mainstream consumer use and raid with all of its
trade-offs honestly isn't a great solution because it doesn't solve the
price as for the performance I don't
knows sorry guys I mean this this is not
like the move from hard drives to SSDs
where I was ending up in like YouTube
comments shouting matches with people who didn't get why I was so excited to
pay five X for one-fifth of the capacity
or whatever it was octane is faster it
is but the way that Intel's pitching it
it's not faster in a noticeable way at
least not for consumers the data center is a whole other story so
we've seen other publications talk about using it as a scratch disk in a
workstation or something like that obtained does have higher write
endurance than the NAND flash in traditional SSDs but then in my mind the
900p with its wider interface and much higher capacities is the product for
that maybe with RAM price being what it is
the 800 peak who would make sense as like a cheaper way to expand system
memory I'm not sure about that one either it sounds like a driver nightmare
now in the future as prices fall pull I
will happily take my better system
responsiveness but for now I have a hard
time recommending paying the extra for this particular product as a boot drive
so the conclusion then is good technology great technology but still
looking for a reason why people might want to buy this one let us know in the
comments if you disagree it's making of things to disagree about
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