The fastest SSD for gaming, and one big problem..
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2018-05-06
·
1,430 words · ~7 min read
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3d crosspoint or as Intel prefers to call it probably
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for sex appeal reasons octane now we had
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a hands-on look at this technology back in april with these tiny low capacity
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models that were designed to make a hard drive that they accompanied performed
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more like a traditional SSD and it worked pretty well so since then we've
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been itching to get our hands on one of the full fat obtained drives that Intel
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has been promising for years and get our
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hands on one we did but what does the real-world performance of a storage
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medium whose raw performance is claimed
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to be up to a thousand times faster than
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man flash look like well let's find out
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after I tell you today's video is brought to you by be quiet! the dark bass
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700 is extremely versatile and features RGB LED lighting plus a tempered glass
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side panel window and more check it out at the link below
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the octane 900p is a four lane PCI
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Express 3.0 card with an all-metal heatsink and an easily removable
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backplate that's full of helpful information about the drive on a sticker
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but what's more interesting is actually what's underneath so here we see our
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first indication that there is more to this card than just a PCI Express 2 m
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dot 2 converter board like you might expect then when we flip it over and
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gently spudge off the heatsink proper it reveals more of the same this is
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absolutely a purpose-built card and the
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comparably immense cooler and beefy
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onboard processor should tell you this SSD means business which is kind of
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strange considering the star citizen promo on the box now you can learn more
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about obtained here but for now the TL
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DR is this the exact details of obtains
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arrangement are a trade secret but the
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end result is a storage latency of a
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theoretical thousand times faster than traditional mend making it only 10 times
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slower than in that sense then D RAM so
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while Intel's rated sequential read and write speeds don't even get us fast as a
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fast SSD like a samsung 960 pro it
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handles significantly more operations per second with seven times the write
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endurance on this consumer product and a mind splitting
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34 times the write endurance for the
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data center oriented obtain P 4800 X
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making the finite lifespans of NAND
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based products a concern that we can bury in the past so the high-end video
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editors and data scientists out there are salivating right now because this
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kind of speed and endurance makes these larger drives amazing for use as scratch
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disks as for what that means for gamers
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well Intel says that load times will be
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significantly reduced and
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suddenly that star citizen promo makes more sense because this game recommends
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a 200 gig SSD
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so to test this thing we need a CPU and
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a platform capable of taking full advantage of it we chose our x2 99 bench
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with a mix of synthetic and real-world benchmarks our SSDs by the way were
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secured raced in preparation for testing in Crystal disc mark we see more or less
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as advertised speeds across our drives with octane scoring quite a bit higher
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on the 4k randoms at a queue depth of 1 than the others hinting at its
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capability for much higher responsiveness moving on to performance
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tests we can see that octane managed much more consistent latency that edges
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closer to but not quite RAM disk levels
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of responsiveness this is super
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impressive and it's at this point then that we wondered whether or not obtained
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would make a difference for some of the heavy tasks that we deal with around the
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office like editing 8k red video footage
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and premiere or rendering with SolidWorks but as it turns out no no it
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does not SolidWorks finished its i/o test about 4 seconds faster on obtain so
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loading or saving would be your primary benefit here unless you run out of RAM
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during a simulation that could be a very different story and as for premiere well
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in a gigantic surprise to no one it is
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so poorly optimized for this that when
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we simulated a low memory situation with a 24 gig RAM drive it just choked no
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matter which drive we had our swap file or the footage on so then we secure
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erase the drives again and copied over our Steam library to see if we could
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spot any differences in game load times which unfortunately due to the massive
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install sizes of many modern games means that we say goodbye to our RAM disk in
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our testing from here on out rebooting between runs we ended up with well
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honestly pretty underwhelming results
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compared to the samsung 960 Pro biggest Delta between them was only a
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little over half a second and even our aging Kingston KC 400 and fashioned SATA
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SSD really doesn't do poorly here though
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this is another non surprise to people who pay closer attention to benchmarks
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than they do to marketing one last secure race and an install of Ubuntu
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later our final test is Houdini a piece of software by side effects that handles
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physics simulations for the high end rendering used by big blockbuster film
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and game companies our test file will be a rendering of a maelstrom that has 1.1
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billion particles interacting with each other so just one frame is gonna eat our
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RAM for breakfast meaning that our RAM disk again is not coming back as for the
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rest well to generate 8 frames our 960
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Pro Kover an hour of i/o thrashing while
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our obtain killed it in just under 29
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minutes as for the KC 400 while we gave
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it a participation trophy so then should you go out and spend $600 on an only 480
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gig octane drive if you're a normal user I'm gonna come right out and say no
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because the chances are pretty slim that you would ever notice a difference
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compared to a traditional NVMe SSD and
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even a SATA one is probably fine for you in most cases as for heavier workloads
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well maybe if you must have the best of the
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best but I'm gonna come out and tell you again that you are not going to feel a
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difference like you did when you went from a hard drive to a conventional SSD
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it's not like that with that said if you
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have a real workload that can benefit from obtains versatility as not just
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hyper fast storage like running many
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virtual machines off of a single Drive but also its low latency and lower cost
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compared to system memory where you can use it as an overflow for your RAM like
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in our Maelstrom demo well then while
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the price of entry is steep the benefits may just outweigh the costs
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watching guys if this video sucks you know what to do but if it was awesome
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get subscribed hit that like button or check out the link to where to buy the
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stuff we featured in the video description though only if your workload
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merits it also in the description is a link to our merch store which has cool
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shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join