Our analysis of the first Intel Optane units that this manufacturer brought to the market left us with mixed feelings that did not make it very clear if this storage technology could become a reference in a market dominated by traditional SSDs.
It seems that Intel strongly believe that it is, because they just presented the Intel Optane SSD 900P Series, a new family of solutions based on 3D XPoint technology in this case, yes, is aimed at users of gaming equipment and those of work stations, where of course the preliminary benchmarks of Intel promise excellent performances.
Up to 2,500 MB / s reading speed
In the presentation of the product in fact there was special participation of the developers of ‘Star Citizen’ a promising game with spatial ambience that according to its creators especially benefits from the technology of these Optane SSD 900P units.
This is due to an even lower latency (less than 10 microseconds) even in situations of intensive workload, in addition to better performance and significant IOPS growth: up to 550,000 in random 4K reading and 500,000 IOPS in random 4K writing. The expected performances of sequential read and write are equally outstanding: 2,500 and 2,000 MB / s according to the manufacturer.
The units arrive in two formats: a 2.5-inch U.2 drive with a capacity of 280 GB, and a PCIe card that is available with both 280 GB and 480 GB capacity.
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No M.2 connectors
In tasks related to the field of workstations Intel responsible for the results of their tests when comparing these units with SSD Samsung 960 Pro 512 GB NVMe, and of course in the tests with SPECwpc in terms of transfers measured with their Iometer the results were clearly favorable to the Intel unit.
It is nonetheless important to note that the units are not available with the M.2 connection that has already become a de facto standard in the storage industry. Instead, the “non-PCIe” unit makes use of a U.2 connector more oriented to business environments . The reason for using this connector is the energy consumption requirements that the connector had to satisfy so that these units could behave optimally.
The units, however, are fully compatible with RAID configurations, but are not intended for laptops – at the moment there are no plans in this regard, explained in Intel. They are compatible with Windows 10 and Linux operating systems, and can behave like boot units for the computers in which they are used.
Price and availability of the Optane SSD 900P
The prices of the units are of 389 dollars for the models with 280 GB of capacity, and of 599 dollars for the model of 480 GB. These units are available as of today in the United States, and it is expected that they will soon reach other markets.