Intel Optane 900P: Review and Tests

Intel Optane 900P Review – Contents

1. 3D Xpoint Memory Revolutionises SSDs
2. Which Drives Have We Compared?
3. Methods of SSD Testing
4. Intel Optane 900p 280GB in the PC MARK 8
5. The Intel Optane 900p SDD and Competition in Crystal Disk Mark 5.5.0.
6. Intel Optane 900p SSD and Competition in Anvil SSD PRO
7. Conclusion and my first impressions of the Intel Optane 900p

3D Xpoint Memory Revolutionises SSDs

If you have ever done research on SSDs to any depth, you'll have some across terms like TLC, MLC, drivers, cache, write speed, longevity and service life. Especially in connection to M.2 SSD drives, you'll also see terms related to temperature and overheating, corresponding with performance drops due to thermal throttling. The great news is that with Intel Optane 900p, you can stop worrying about these problems. The main and undisputed advantage of Intel Optane SSD 900p is that this drive isn't bothered by the amount of data stored on it and what type of files it contains – it maintains constant speeds. This is also true for wear and tear. It doesn’t matter if you’ve owned the drive for a week and have written 10TB of data to it, or have owned it for a year and have racked up 400TB (which is the total space of VNAND drives, held by the competition). The Intel Optane 900p promises to maintain its constant powerful performance. The 3D Xpoint technology used by Intel Optane 900p SSDs is still relatively new and constitutes a major game changer. For today’s tests, I took several of the more expensive M.2 drives and one classic SATA drive. It’s up to you to decide what kind of power you want in your PC. 

Which Drives Have We Compared?

Area of comparison	Intel Optane 900P	Intel 750 Series	Samsung 960 EVO	Samsung 960 PRO	Samsung 960 PRO	Samsung 850 PRO	Kingston KC1000
Tested capacity	280GB	400GB	1TB	1TB	2TB	512GB	960GB
Sequential reading	2500 MB/s	2200 MB/s	3200 MB/s	3500 MB/s	3500 MB/s	550 MB/s	2700 MB/s
Sequential writing	2000 MB/s	900 MB/s	1900 MB/s	2100 MB/s	2100 MB/s	520 MB/s	1600 MB/s
Random reading	up to 550,000 IOPS	up to 430,000 IOPS	up to 380,000 IOPS	up to 440,000 IOPS	up to 440,000 IOPS	up to 98,000 IOPS	up to 190,000 IOPS
Random writing	up to 500,000 IOPS	up to 230,000 IOPS	up to 360,000 IOPS	up to 360,000 IOPS	up to 360,000 IOPS	up to 90,000 IOPS	up to 165,000 IOPS
Power consumption	14W	12W	5.7W	5.3W	5.8W	3.2W	7.4W
Max. written data	8760TB	70GB/day	400TB	800TB	1200TB	150TB	1000TB
Interface	U.2, PCIe NVMe 3.0 x4	U.2, PCIe NVMe 3.0 x4	M.2 NVMe 3.0 x4	M.2 NVMe 3.0 x4	M.2 NVMe 3.0 x4	SATA 6GB/s	PCIe NVMe 3.0 x4
Cell type	3D XPOINT	MLC	TLC	MLC	MLC	MLC	MLC
Price	392EUR	-	500EUR	654EUR	1347EUR	284EUR	483EUR

The prices were valid on 21. 12. 2017

Methods of SSD Testing

It’s not easy to put together a set of drives to compare with Intel Optane 900p, so the choices were based primarily on the price point. Naturally, I included the SATA drive mostly for reference, as well as the competitively priced 2TB Samsung 960 PRO model. In order to make the comparison relevant as far as the drive usage is concerned, I formatted each drive to GPT and after the loading of Windows 10 OS, I filled the drives to 75% (+- 3%) capacity in 80:20 ratio with 128k files of sequential type and 4k files of random type. On the Internet, most tests fill the drive with a text file or large video files, but you should be mostly interested in the drive performance when it is filled with files of various sizes. Let's assume that a part of the drive is filled with small 4k files – and this is the part where you’ll feel the performance of an SSD drive the most. For this purpose, I use special software that I won’t go into detail about here – this is an advanced software and its description isn’t relevant for the purposes of this article.

For each of the tested drives, with the exception of Intel Optane 900p and Series 750, I have disabled the clearing of Windows cache for the write caching. I mention this fact to further describe the testing and also as a small tip that could help you boost the performance of your SSD drive. This option can be accessed as follows: This computer -> your drive -> right mouse click -> Properties -> Hardware -> your drive -> Properties -> Change Settings -> Policies.

Many people tend to forget that it is important to use the appropriate driver. Samsung and Intel use their respective NVMe drivers. Among the tested drives, only Kingston KC1000 used the standard NVMe driver included in the Windows 10 OS. If you want to achieve optimal performance, you have to download these drivers from the manufacturer’s website and install them manually.

All the tested SSD drives were brand new and freshly unpacked. Even though this factor is irrelevant for Intel Optane 900p, it is important for all the other tested drives. If you want to compare used SSD drives, you would have to use Secure Erasure method on top of the processes mentioned above – this is a type of formatting used for SSD that can usually restore the drives to their former glory. This awesome function can be found in UEFI in the Tools section on ASUS motherboards of the Republic of Gamers series, for example. However, be aware that using Secure Erasure will erase all data on the drive. Also, NEVER use or try to use Secure Erasure on Intel Optane drive – this can irreparably damage your SSD drive.

There is always the question of how and in what to test SSD drives. Since it’s not that simple to interpret the results of various queue-depths tests and present them to the reader, it's better to use summary test, where the results are presented as time, speed or score. For this purpose, I use Storage tests included in PC MARK 8 and Futuremark. These tests use real workloads, such as Adobe software, Microsoft Office and several games with substantial volume of files of various sizes. I also included speed results from Crystal Disk Mark and Anvil SSD for reference.

Intel Optane 900p 280GB in the PC MARK 8

PC MARK 8 includes a set of tests based on real scenarios that you might encounter in daily use. Even though this is an older version of the benchmark, these tests are still most relevant for the typical user. If you’re interested in more detailed information regarding the manner of testing SSD and HDD drives in PC MARK 8, here’s a link to specific technical data. PC MARK 8 also offers more detailed tests – however, these can take 12–24 hour per drive and unfortunately, we don’t have time for that.

Intel Optane 900p in PC MARK 8 – Storage Bandwidth Test

The result of storage bandwidth test is presented as a geometric average of the number of bytes per second processed by the drive while reading or writing in all ten tests. In other words, this result counts the state and number of I/O (input/output) operations, when the state in queue-depths queues was at least 1. Therefore, this is a result of speeds across all the following tests that you will see throughout all the queues in which the files were processed according to priority. Intel Optane 900p comes out of this broad-spectrum test as an absolute winner that has crushed all competition. 

You can imagine these tests in the following way – you’re standing at the counter waiting for movie tickets and all the windows are busy serving customers. The goal of the first 5 windows is to get the customers into the movie theater, since the longest queues are at these first five windows and there is only a handful of customers at the other windows. The movie is starting in 2 minutes and you need the customers inside. Even though windows 6 and further clear up and there are no people waiting, the customers are still standing in the first 5 queues. What do you need to do? In short, you need the first 5 windows to process customers extremely fast. And this is something that Intel Optane 900p does exceptionally well.  

Performance of Intel Optane 900p in the PC MARK 8

Performance of Intel Optane 900p in World of Warcraft

Performance of Intel Optane 900p in Battlefield 3

Performance of Intel Optane 900p in Adobe Photoshop: Light Test

Performance of Intel Optane 900p in Adobe Photoshop: Hard Test

Performance of Intel Optane 900p in Adobe InDesign

Performance of Intel Optane 900p in Adobe After Effects

Performance of Intel Optane 900p in Adobe Illustrator

Performance of Intel Optane 900p in Microsoft Word

Performance of Intel Optane 900p in Microsoft Excel 

Performance of Intel Optane 900p in Microsoft Power Point

As you can see, you are not really going to feel the speed in the real tests, unless you’re switching from a classic SATA SSD or, God forbid, from an old HDD drive. However, if you’re moving files back and forth frequently, regardless of their sizes, you will like the Intel Optane 900p.

The Intel Optane 900p SSD and Its Competitors in the Crystal Disk Mark 5.5.0.

Crystal Disk Mark is a popular benchmark for both HDD and SSD drives. In the first test of Intel Optane 900p, you can notice a note “+ Intel Driver”. I have been informed that the standard NVMe driver and Samsung NVMe driver provides better performance with Intel Optane 900p. Therefore, I have tested everything. This information seems to have been incorrect and the drive has provided the best performance with Intel driver. However, I have performed all the tests in Windows 10, the most popular operating system – this information could prove to be more relevant in other systems.

SSD Intel Optane 900p and Intel 750 Series in CDM test

And what about SSD Intel Optane 900p speeds in 4k? I have run the tests several times, because I couldn’t believe the results.

Kingston KC 1000 960 GB and Samsung 850 PRO 512 GB SATA

This doesn’t really need any commentary, but try to thoroughly compare the results with SSD Intel Optane 900p and flagship products of other manufacturers.

Samsung 960 EVO and PRO with 1TB size in Crystal Disk Mark 5.5.0

Until recently, if you wanted an SSD drive with awesome performance, the clear choices were 960 PRO models and, with a tighter budget, EVO models from Samsung. Without much ado, Intel has released the Intel Optane 900p and swept all competition away. Pay attention to the highlighted features while comparing the results and reading reviews online. You should be most interested in the processing speeds of small 4k files. The very popular sequential speeds are generally irrelevant and in many times of no consequence whatsoever.

Samsung 960 PRO 2TB in Crystal Disk Mark test

Intel Optane 900p SSD and Its Competition in Anvil SSD PRO

Anvil PRO is one of the benchmarks most frequently used to compare the speeds and performances of SSD drives. I have briefly mentioned the queue depth performance – this test will also show you some results.

Intel Optane 900p 280GB and Intel 750 Series 400GB in Anvil PRO test

When comparing Intel Optane 900p to the competition, pay attention especially to the processing of small files, i.e. 4K files. As you can see, these results are completely different from the competition. The 3D XPOINT technology is a game changer and I’m looking forward to its production getting cheaper and the prices getting lower. 

Kingston KC 1000 960 GB and Samsung 850 PRO 512 GB SATA in Anvil PRO

It’s a shame that the manufacturer of Kingston KC 1000 doesn’t have his own NVMe driver, as is the case with Intel and Samsung, but I cannot fathom the reason for this.

Samsung 960 EVO and PRO with 1TB size in Anvil PRO benchmark

If you’re under the impression that Intel Optane 900p doesn't bring any difference based on PC MARK 8 tests, carefully review the individual results again – even flagship models like Samsung 960 PRO 1TB and 2TB are approximately half as fast in 4k READ tests.

Samsung 960 PRO 2TB in Anvil PRO test

Conclusion and My First Impressions of the Intel Optane 900p SSD

I like it. Seriously, I’m very impressed with the new SSD Intel Optane 900p. Existing modern SSD drives have two weak points. First, performance drops as you fill up the drive; second, the wear resulting from writing. Both of these weaknesses are eliminated in this new SSD drive – it speaks for itself, the 8760TB of written data listed as the service life in comparison with 1200TB of written data in a competing drive with 3 times the price (even though this drive has 2TB of capacity). Of course, we have to take into consideration the fact that the 280GB SSD drive will probably have less data written to it than a 2TB SSD drive in a similar period of time, but Intel Optane 900p offers a substantially problem-free and maintenance-free solution with unparalleled speed processing small files across operation queues (queue depths). 

In today’s review, I have offered mostly the classic tests, but while my interest in Intel Optane 900p lasts, I’m in contact with several people who are thoroughly benchmarking the performance of this SSD drive. Similar to my experiments with liquid nitrogen and trying to get the most from CPUs, GPUs and RAM, these people and groups are interested in getting the most from SSD drives, and believe me – what you see in my reviews is very far from these peak performances. For example, despite the lack of official support for Windows Server 2012 and 2008, using several tricks, you can run and use Intel Optane 900p and boost its performance by more than 1/3, which is unbelievable.