Why Did Intel Even Make This? – Optane 800P SSD
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2018-05-06
·
1,388 words · ~6 min read
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SSDs are finally at the point where their costs have fallen and their
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capacities are so high that they are
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truly a replacement for the hard drives
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of your which raises the question then what of
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the heck was Intel thinking releasing
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expensive 58 and
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118 Gigabyte SSDs for performance
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enthusiasts in the year 2018 I'm gonna
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level with you we're still not sure but we're gonna
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walk you through what we do know about the Intel octane SSD 800 P
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after this message from cable mod K blog
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Pro Series cables use extra thick wires for a fuller more robust look merged
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terminals on the component side of each cable have been eliminated for a cleaner
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build check them out below
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so just like it's smaller accelerator
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siblings the opt-in 800 P comes in a standard m dot two form factor which
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allows it to work as either a normal storage drive in any machine with NVMe
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or this is unofficial though in supported systems as an accelerator for
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your hard drive the caveat at this time
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though is that it only does that on your boot drive so as
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enthusiasts around here anyway we would really like to see more flexibility in
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the future for our applications like booting off of an SSD like a normal one
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and then using a large octane module to accelerate maybe like a gigantic steam
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library on a high-capacity secondary drive of course until isn't marketing
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the 800 P as an accelerator anyway but
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that didn't stop us from feeling like we needed to ask
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what are these things for them and their
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response was kind of baffling they were like well you know we feel like 58 gigs
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is big enough for a dedicated boot drive
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and I mean yeah
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technically you could install Windows 10 on 58 gigs but I mean you'd have spent a
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hundred and thirty dollars on a storage solution by that point that wouldn't
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even have enough additional space left over to store the hibernation file of a
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high-end system with 32 gigs of RAM these days now a hundred and eighteen
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gigs is obviously quite a bit better but
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even then you're gonna have to be giving me a lot of performance to give up 3/4
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of the capacity that I would get with a decent NAND based SATA SSD
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so let's go ahead and fire it up shall we
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so this is it this is the opt-in experience we are booted off our 118 gig
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drive get some benchmarks fired up here shall
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we so starting with crystal disk mark at a key depth of eight compared to a samsung
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960 Pro we're getting slightly higher random reads and then significantly
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inferior random writes but at Q depth
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one obtains random read performance is over triple that's really impressive
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given that this is closer to what most average users would be experiencing in
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their day-to-day lives moving on to performance test op team
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triples the speed of our Samsung and also has significantly lower latency
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eight milliseconds is a full frame delay at 120 Hertz where our SATA SSD is over
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two frames at sixty Hertz adding a Lucan
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file copy in the background our op tain drive maintains its lead but not by
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quite as much moving on to Microsoft Word our average scores put-up tay ninh
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at just over a second lead in load times
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with excel and powerpoint yielding smaller gains launching from obtain
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though it should be noted that every configuration is fast enough for normal
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people who don't launch ten documents at once Google Chrome launches marginally
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faster while Adobe Premiere saw just under a second shaved off its load time
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finally and this will be unsurprising if you saw our opt-in 900p video doom the
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only big game that would comfortably fit on even our larger module was hardly
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different at all okay so in spite of
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using only two PCI Express Lanes versus
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the four for the samsung 960 pro that we used as our benchmark NVMe drive the
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octane 800 piece performances as the kids say think on fleek so maybe the
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solution then to our capacity woes is
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another one let's try running them in
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raid zero alright then bippity Boppity
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done now compared to a single drive the
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numbers look pretty good in our synthetic tests with only slight
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regressions at a key depth of one where raid really shines though is in the
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responsiveness check that latency and
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then even better check out the max latency while we have our file copy
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running that's just over one frame at
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240 Hertz set what I would consider to be an unreasonable load on a boot drive
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unfortunately though we do see some regressions in most of our program
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launch tests with the notable exception of Adobe premier which demonstrates what
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Intel's been saying all along that obtained is not about raw throughput but
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more about very low latency which is why you won't find how many megabytes per
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second it does anywhere on the Box
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bringing us then back to our original question maybe you can help us answer it
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who is this for what is it for at a
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hundred and thirty bucks for fifty eight gigs and 200 for a hundred and eighteen
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gigs the pricing is not exactly
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competitive it's too small for real
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professional work or even mainstream consumer use and raid with all of its
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trade-offs honestly isn't a great solution because it doesn't solve the
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price as for the performance I don't
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knows sorry guys I mean this this is not
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like the move from hard drives to SSDs
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where I was ending up in like YouTube
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comments shouting matches with people who didn't get why I was so excited to
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pay five X for one-fifth of the capacity
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or whatever it was octane is faster it
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is but the way that Intel's pitching it
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it's not faster in a noticeable way at
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least not for consumers the data center is a whole other story so
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we've seen other publications talk about using it as a scratch disk in a
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workstation or something like that obtained does have higher write
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endurance than the NAND flash in traditional SSDs but then in my mind the
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900p with its wider interface and much higher capacities is the product for
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that maybe with RAM price being what it is
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the 800 peak who would make sense as like a cheaper way to expand system
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memory I'm not sure about that one either it sounds like a driver nightmare
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now in the future as prices fall pull I
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will happily take my better system
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responsiveness but for now I have a hard
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time recommending paying the extra for this particular product as a boot drive
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so the conclusion then is good technology great technology but still
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looking for a reason why people might want to buy this one let us know in the
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comments if you disagree it's making of things to disagree about
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the way we integrate sponsors the Thermaltake p90 is an open frame
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bays with modular drive trays and high liquid cooling expandability check it
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out today at the link in the video description so thanks for watching guys if you
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