
Intel's New Optane 905P Is the Fastest SSD - rbanffy
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-announces-optane-ssd-905p,36990.html
======
vbezhenar
I'm surprised that many people don't realize that Optane to SSD for consumer
computers is similar to SSD to HDD. Consumer computers don't run workloads
with QD 32. Their workloads are overwhelmingly low-threaded, so random
performance for low queue depths is what matters. And Optane beats even best
SSDs by a large margin.

I guess that modern SSD are just so fast, that going faster is not that big
deal. But if you want the best SSD for non-server workloads, Optane is a way
to go.

~~~
chacham15
Im not sure this is true. Looking at the graph, the 970 outperforms the optane
for sequential reads whereas the optane outperforms in the 4k random
read/write range. So, it would seem that cases which are more sequential than
random which include watching/streaming video/assets would run faster on the
970. So video game enthusiasts would still prefer the 970. If you're running a
database, that 4k random read rate would seem to boost performance by quite a
margin. Or am I missing something?

~~~
olavgg
Sequential read/write is usually optimized for burst workloads on consumer
ssd's. The Intel 900p can sustain its peak read/write performance for hours.

Anyway, the big difference with Optane is that its performance is more similar
to having more system memory. I have not benchmarked this, but I believe a
system with just 8GB ram + Optane will run better than a system with 16GB ram
and Samsung 970 pro for workloads using up to 16GB of ram. There is a reason
Intel announced its memory drive technology for Optane DC4800x
[https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/software/intel-
memor...](https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/software/intel-memory-drive-
technology.html)

EDIT: adding a link to lwn.net article explaing the use of swap/memory
overcommit
[https://lwn.net/Articles/704478/](https://lwn.net/Articles/704478/)

~~~
eloff
Nothing will beat a workload requiring 16GB of RAM, than a system with 16GB+
of RAM. You don't even need to benchmark to know that much.

~~~
walrus01
for comparison, write speed to RAM on DDR4-3200 is somewhere between 50000 to
60000MB/second on a fairly normal skylake workstation platform.

~~~
dimensi0nal
PCIe latency is probably the bigger issue.

~~~
dogma1138
This. Which is why Intel is working on Optane DIMMs.

Traversing the root complex can take upto 100 cpu cycles each way.

~~~
Makepio
yep but Optane DIMM /NVDIMM is not for client product. It is on data center
product list. Persistent Memory isn't just a concept on the textbook. It be
realized now.

~~~
dogma1138
So was Optane at first and so were SSDs in general. DDR4 already has an
optional spec for NVDIMMs, DDR5 will make it mandatory.

------
mrb
It's not the "fastest SSD" on all metrics. My laptop's NVMe SSD, a Samsung
PM981, benchmarks at 2100 MB/s sequential reads, whereas the Optane 905P
measures only 1669 MB/s in Tom's Hardware bench.

~~~
bitL
You won't notice much difference between a regular SATA SSD and M.2 PCIe in
normal things, like opening apps, playing games, booting etc. Only if you do
4K RAW video processing, copying files all the time and similar. This new SSD
should give you the first noticeable boost in normal apps comparing to the
rest of SSDs. Pity Intel couldn't deliver its original promises of 100x lower
latency, that would have been even more impressive.

~~~
frankharv
I would imagine that HN audience does more than consumer tasks.

Here is a real world figure. I can compile my FreeBSD NanoBSD build in 30
minutes compared to 2.5 hours on SATA3 SSD's

Using a Toshiba NVMe XG3 mounted on a paddle card.

I see zero heat issues with the Toshiba.

~~~
textmode
Assuming enough RAM to hold the source tree, how does build time with root on
mfs/tmpfs compare to the NVMe?

------
altmind
I'm surprised that intel requires specific CPU support for their optane
solutions. Can anybody explain rationale behind this? Why every other SSD
implementation just use m2/sata standarts?

~~~
wtallis
> I'm surprised that intel requires specific CPU support for their optane
> solutions.

The only Optane-related thing that requires a particular CPU platform is their
Optane Memory caching software for Windows. That's the very bottom of the
Optane product stack, while the 905P is the top.

Intel's Optane Memory caching for Windows is built on top of their consumer
platform's NVMe software RAID functionality. Intel's consumer chipsets have a
mode where they hide any NVMe devices connected through the chipset, making
them no longer appear in regular PCIe device enumeration. Instead, the drives
can be accessed through non-standard interfaces on the chipset's SATA
controller. This remapping ensures that only Intel's software RAID drivers can
bind to the drives, which makes things a bit simpler for Intel.

This NVMe remapping feature was first added to Intel's _Skylake_ generation
chipsets, and Optane Memory was introduced with the next generation ( _Kaby
Lake_ ). _Skylake_ systems didn't get the firmware updates necessary to add
Optane Memory caching support (for booting off a cached volume) even though
they had all the hardware capabilities and their firmware already had NVMe
RAID boot support.

All Optane products released so far are standard NVMe SSDs and can be treated
as such. If you want to use SSD caching software or software RAID from
somebody other than Intel, it won't care whether or not your drive is an
Optane product.

------
thehoagie
I'm not sure why they would compare to the Samsung 970 EVO (budget) and not
the 970 PRO. Looks to to head to head in random read /writes and the 970 PRO
is faster at sequential operations

~~~
RossBencina
I too was surprised to see Optane compared with Samsung EVO. It is not the
correct comparison to make.

------
awat
Whoa, 575,000 IOPS For Random Read on a single drive.

------
zenovision
A friend of mine tried Optane SSD and he didn't notice any performance
increase in software compilation or anything else comparing to 960 SSD from
Samsung. So I don't expect to get much from such upgrade and will just keep my
current 981 SSD.

~~~
shmerl
Compilation doesn't sound like an I/O intense workload. It's more CPU intense.
Some heavy DB usage or video editing on the other hand is I/O intense.

~~~
rleigh
Compilation itself, no. However, linking can be very I/O-intensive,
particularly if using static linking of large libraries. And packaging up of
build products at the end of the process. These can often be serial rate-
limiting steps in comparison with parallelised compilation, so can end up
taking a disproportionate fraction of the total wall clock time.

While it can clearly vary widely depending upon the nature of what you are
building, it can in some cases be worth using faster storage to shave many
tens of minutes off the build time.

------
gok
The promise for XPoint was DRAM-like latency with NAND-like throughput
(and...nonvolatility of course). I’d be curious to see some of these
benchmarks against (say) ramfs, or see how well it works as a swap drive.

~~~
wtallis
It's rather pointless to benchmark Optane SSDs against DRAM. Later this year
we'll have Optane DIMMs that aren't constrained by the PCIe bus and will
actually be able to demonstrate the latency capabilities of the underlying 3D
XPoint media without all the overhead of NVMe and PCIe.

~~~
gok
Is PCIe latency that much worse than main memory? I honestly don’t know; I was
under the impression that both had latency in the 10s of nanoseconds.

~~~
wtallis
NVMe devices using battery-backed DRAM or MRAM offer about 5µs access time,
and current Optane SSDs are under 10µs. (NAND flash based SSDs with RAM-based
write caches also have write latency below 10µs.)

~~~
gok
So is the bottleneck really NVMe? Could there be a different protocol over
PCIe that had lower latency?

~~~
wtallis
NVMe was more or less designed to offer the lowest possible latency for a
block storage protocol. You could beat it with direct memory mapping, but then
you're limiting compatibility to systems with working 64-bit I/O addressing
and storage media that doesn't require complicated management like NAND flash
does.

------
daxfohl
Sequential read is still outpaced by Samsung. So if you're optimizing for boot
time or other reading-big-things tasks, this may be slightly worse. And
certainly not worth the markup.

~~~
Moral_
Samsung drives also rely on DRAM which isn't Powerloss safe.

~~~
gruez
there isn't anything wrong with using dram for buffering, as long as flushes
are respected. is that the case with samsung?

~~~
snuxoll
Often it's not the case, which is why general consensus with SSD's for ZFS
SLOG devices is to go with ones that advertise end-to-end power loss
protection unless sufficient testing has been done to guarantee the drive
protects against partial-writes and doesn't lie about a flush being complete.

Samsung has bigger issues with writes though, almost all of their current
drives are TLC NAND which has extremely poor write performance so while short
bursty writes can be fast (due to there being a chunk of SLC NAND cells as a
write buffer) sustained writes are terribly slow. Optane doesn't typically
meet the same peak write performance but it will beat most (all?) TLC drives
on the market in sustained workloads.

~~~
zlynx
The sustained write performance is why you might buy a Samsung PRO model. The
PRO models have a lower burst write but can sustain high write speeds
indefinitely, while the EVO model's speed crashes when it hits the limit.

------
cat199
So, single drive configurations - great.

Anyone using more advanced configurations (e.g. RAID) for these type of
devices and what/how..

e.g. how to take advantage of things like this for large RDBMS installs which
require N>1 devices for capacity alone (if not more throughput)...

Like: Taking GPU/PCI-slot optimized server and threw 8 of this style of device
in there as a soft RAID50, etc.

would love to perform some experiments, but I don't have a spare $20k lying
around 'for fun', so real world battle tales would be great...

~~~
syntheticcdo
Linus Tech Tips did 4x 960s in Raid 0 and hit 7.5 GBps sustained write:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzzavO5a4OQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzzavO5a4OQ)

------
Izmaki
Would something like this be possible to install on older motherboards that do
not have an M.2 slot, or is there some limitation in the chipset that I don't
know of?

~~~
joenathanone
If you want to boot from it your bios would need to support it, but it should
work in any PC as a storage drive.

~~~
morganvachon
I believe all that is necessary is NVMe support in both the BIOS and your OS.
Standard mini-PCIe NVMe drives are seen as PCIe devices and this is the same
thing, just in a full size card form factor. Modern Linux based OSes will boot
from it just fine, as will Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016. I don't believe
macOS allows booting from NVMe PCIe devices on the legacy Mac Pro even with
High Sierra, but the OS has native support for using it as a storage drive.

~~~
wtallis
> Standard mini-PCIe NVMe drives

I don't believe anyone has actually made one of those. MiniPCIe is a different
form factor than M.2; the latter is newer and has almost completely replaced
miniPCIe. MiniPCIe only provides a single lane of PCI Express, while most M.2
variants allow for two or four lanes, and almost all NVMe SSDs support at
least two lanes.

~~~
morganvachon
Sorry, you're right, that's what I was referring to. M.2 is still PCIe just
with more lanes than mini PCIe, as you said. My point was it's all PCIe to the
computer and OS.

Thanks for catching that! :-)

------
keyle
If you find a program to take a long time to open and you do it often, I
recommend RAM disk. Trade a bit of that ram you don't use, for blazing fast
loads.

~~~
the8472
for a read-only workload (such as opening a program) I don't see how that has
any advantage over the OS' page cache.

~~~
asiniongnoi
The OS doesn't know what data is important; it can only guess. You can know
that you want immediate access to data at any time even if you haven't used it
in ages.

I doubt that's true in practice, especially on a desktop workload.

~~~
paulmd
You can pin files into memory using vmtouch, if you like. Not sure if there is
a Windows equivalent.

It would be nice if there was a resident manager that watched for certain
processes to be launched and then pinned their directories (or certain files)
into memory, then unpinned them when they were shut down.

~~~
magnat
There already is such service bundled in Windows and enabled by default -
PreFetcher (in Windows XP) and SuperFetch (since Vista). It was a bit too
aggressive in Vista and caused minutes of HDD churning after booting up.

~~~
rasz
last time I checked prefetch was disabled when windows detected being booted
from SSD.

~~~
vbezhenar
I'm using Windows with SSD and I saw superfetch process using disk
aggressively sometimes. I'm not sure that it's disabled, at least completely
disabled.

~~~
rasz
MS says ''Windows 8 and 10 automatically disables SuperFetch service''

[https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/The-Defrag-Show/Defrag-
Disab...](https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/The-Defrag-Show/Defrag-Disabling-
Hibernation-Superfetch-onboard-VGA#time=05m50s)

------
sgt101
What's a good spec for a server for a data science group right now?

I'm thinking a shared resource attached to a hadoop cluster with R & Python
workloads across 100's Gb's of data - so offload to Hadoop for embarrassingly
parallel over 20+ TB but go as quick as you can for large somewhat parallel or
sequential loads. About 10 users...

We have a couple of GPU servers for DNN's so that's a separate workload for
us.

~~~
herold2422
Depends on the "data science".

Start with a fat machine and see how far you can go:
[https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-
ax](https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-ax)

You don't need Hadoop if you crunch through 100GB.

~~~
sgt101
>You don't need Hadoop if you crunch through 100GB. True that, but Hadoop is
for the >100TB stuff where we need the throughput and cost efficiency for
storage (we have multiple >100TB sets and we are not able to afford 100's of
optanes! But Hadoop is not good for some of the problems that are culled out
of these data sets. We can't afford Hadoop nodes with lots of ram and fast
disks.

~~~
mamon
Making up for slow hdd speeds was kind of the major reason Hadoop was
invented: if you spread your data around 100 of slow disks and then run
MapReduce job that reads from all 100 of them simultaneously then you
effectively get 100x read speed. Plus, with rise of Spark which processes data
primarily in RAM you can say that disk speeds are not really an issue for Big
Data.

------
peatfreak
While we're on the topic of Samsung EVO and Pro SSDs, does anybody know if
there's an 870 series of Samsung SATA SSDs coming soon?

~~~
spronkey
Doubtful, the 860 isn't that old.

------
dis-sys
I won't call it a consumer SSD, it beats most enterprise SSDs in mixed
workload and Q1D1 workload.

------
merinowool
I wish something like that existed for a laptop. I know there is 800p, but I
would need 250GB.

~~~
wtallis
There are indications that Intel will soon release a M.2 version of the 905P,
but it'll be pretty rough on your battery.

~~~
merinowool
I don't mind - I am rarely in a position where I can't connect my laptop to
the power source.

------
bitL
So with such high IOPS, this should be similar to the jump from HDDs to SSDs,
right? Finally seeing some real-world boost in apps, as between SSDs SATA-2
and M.2 PCIe the real-world difference was very small, only large file
processing got a noticeable boost (when M.2 didn't get too hot).

~~~
Improvotter
Comparing 100 seconds to 1 seconds makes things look huge (well they are if
you really would have to wait that long). But comparing 0.1s to 0.001 or 0.01s
is alot less noticeable even though the percentage difference is the same.

~~~
bitL
We just have to wait until the next iteration of "What Intel giveth, Microsoft
taketh away" and all the current SSDs would feel like super slow drives.

~~~
lsc
what will that be? Popular VR?

My impression is that Microsoft has been falling down on the job for some
time. in the '90s and aughts a computer felt slow after three years, and was
nigh unusable after five, even for just word processing and web browsing.

These days? the almost new MacBook I'm typing this on only comes with 8gb ram;
that was a decent (but not great) loadout in 2011. And my thinkpad? the other
laptop I use? It _is_ from 2011, also has 8gb ram, and runs just fine. As far
as I can tell, the big difference between my ancient laptop and my new one is
that my new one is way thinner (and has a keyboard that is dramatically more
vulnerable to foreign matter)

I mean, I _do_ own an occulus rift, and it does very much require a modern
computer to run, but as far as I can tell, that's pretty niche. Hardware
requirements just aren't going up the way they used to.

------
m3kw9
Anyone know the speed in relation to ddr3 market ram?

~~~
Rafuino
I found this... maybe helpful?

[http://www.storagereview.com/corsair_vengeance_ddr3_ram_disk...](http://www.storagereview.com/corsair_vengeance_ddr3_ram_disk_review)

