Intel shares specs on blazing fast Optane 905P SSDs

[Shawn Knight]

Listings for Intel’s Optane 905P solid state drives quietly popped up at select retailers including Newegg just days ago. Not much was known about the two new models, however, as accompanying specification lists were slim at best but now, we’ve got a bit more information to share straight from the horse’s mouth.

The 3D XPoint-equipped drives are offered in two configurations: a 480GB model in a 2.5-inch form factor with a U.2 connector and a PCIe x4 card with 960GB. Both offer sequential read speeds of up to 2,600MB/s and writes as fast as 2,200MB/s with random 4KB reads and writes of 575,000 IOPS and 550,000 IOPS, respectively.

The drives are also rated for up to 10 drive writes per day (DWPD) and carry a mean time between failure (MTBF) rating of 1.6 million hours, much higher than a standard solid state drive.

Aside from their high price tag, the other price to pay with Intel’s new Optane 905P line comes in the form of power consumption. The 480GB model can draw up to 12.8W during burst sequential writes while the 960GB variant tops out at 16.4W when performing the same activity. By comparison, a typical Kingston SSD draws a maximum of just 1.535W.

Newegg currently lists the 480GB model for $599 and has the larger 960GB variant priced at $1,299. Both appear to be out of stock at the moment, however.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/74458-intel-shares-specs-blazing-fast-optane-905p-ssds.html

 

[Jack007]

Samsung has been here with those speeds ages ago. Nothing new here except that intel wants a premium price for a product that does not have any advantage over samsung evo pros nvm

 

[Evernessince]

Samsung has been here with those speeds ages ago. Nothing new here except that intel wants a premium price for a product that does not have any advantage over samsung evo pros nvm

Pretty much. The 960 Pro has higher sequential speeds but lower random speeds. MTBF is slightly higher on this Intel drive, but that's just the spec Intel gave it. Likely Intel and Samsung rate their drives differently and from what I've seen Samsung driver can typically go way about their endurance spec.

What I want to see is the latencies, as those are always very important and another category that samsung does very well in.

I don't get the price tag of the Intel drive, it's more than double the 960 Pro 1TB.

 

[BigBoomBoom]

Optane is significantly faster in terms of latency. It is almost RAM level, around 14-15μs. Your fastest SSD is like 100μs. Samsung is developing its Z-NAND SSD that bring latency down to 20μs to compete.

 

[VitalyT]

So to summarize, they are way slower than Samsung 970 Pro, while more expensive and power-hungry. Just like Intel itself.

 

[Top S]

So to summarize, they are way slower than Samsung 970 Pro, while more expensive and power-hungry. Just like Intel itself.

How people "summarize" and compare it to Samsung is hilarious. Intel 900p has 4 times the random read performance that never degrades, as well as a quarter the latency of the best Samsung drives, which matters the most for many "pro" demanding scenarios. It is simply in another league. The best case (before degradation. And consumer drives degrade a lot under heavy workload) sequential performance doesn't matter at all because of the data pattern and workload in those scenarios.

 

[Andrewx8]

Samsung has been here with those speeds ages ago. Nothing new here except that intel wants a premium price for a product that does not have any advantage over samsung evo pros nvm

But it has cool blue lights on it... That makes it worth like 30% more.

 

[OortCloud]

Unfortunately they are pricing Optane out of the market.

AnandTechs review of the earlier model pretty much summed it up at the end. "For most ordinary and even relatively heavy desktop workloads, high-end flash storage is fast enough that further improvements are barely noticeable."