We were lucky enough to get out hands on a couple of Intel Optane SSD 800P 118GB drives for some RAID testing. If the comparatively low sequential transfer speeds of a single 800P aren’t high enough for you, despite their strong random / mixed workload low queue depth performance, putting a couple of the drives in a RAID 0 array could be an ideal solution. Because the Optane drives are also so resilient, RAIDing a couple of them is attractive – you end up with a higher ultimate capacity (if you use RAID 0) with improved sequential transfers as well.
Configuring a couple of Optane SSD 800P series drives in RAID 0 resulted in a significant boost in overall bandwidth according the PCMark Storage benchmark. The drives' overall score increases as well, which puts the configuration just behind the Optane SSD 900P.
Sequential transfers and 4K QD8 reads improve significantly as well, and put the Optane SSD 800P performance at or near the head of the pack. Lower queue depth 4K transfers dropped, however, but at still way out in front of NAND-based SSDs in the read test.
Putting a couple of Optane SSD 800P drives in RAID 0 essentially doubled their performance according to SANDRA as well.
