Intel Optane SSD 905P Review: Seriously Fast Storage For Enthusiasts

Our Test Methods: Under each test condition, the SSDs tested here were installed as secondary volumes in our testbed, with a separate drive used for the OS and benchmark installations. Out testbed's motherboard was updated with the latest BIOS available at the time of publication and AHCI mode was enabled for the host drive.

The SSDs were secure erased prior to testing (when applicable), and left blank without partitions for some tests, while others required them to be partitioned and formatted, as is the case with the ATTO, PCMark, and CrystalDiskMark benchmark tests. Windows firewall, automatic updates, and screen savers were all disabled before testing and Windows 10 Quiet Hours were enabled. In all test runs, we rebooted the system, ensured all temp and prefetch data was purged, waited several minutes for drive activity to settle and for the system to reach an idle state before invoking a test. Also note that all of the drives featured here were tested with their own drivers installed -- not the default Windows 10 NVMe driver.

HotHardware Test System Intel Core i7 and SSD Powered

Processor - Motherboard - Video Card - Memory - Audio - Storage -

Intel Core i7-8700K Gigabyte Z370 Ultra Gaming (Z370 Chipset, AHCI Enabled) Quadro P4000 16GB G.SKILL DDR4-2666 Integrated on board Corsair Force GT (OS Drive) Intel Optane SSD 905P (960GB) Intel Optane SSD 800p (118GB) Intel Optane SSD 900p (280GB) Samsung SSD 970 Pro (512GB) Samsung SSD 960 Pro (1TB) WD Black NVMe (1TB) OCZ RD400 (1TB)

OS - Chipset Drivers - DirectX - Benchmarks -

Windows 10 Pro x64 Intel 10.1.1.45, iRST 16.2.1.1086 DirectX 12 IOMeter 1.1 HD Tune v5.70 ATTO v3.05 AS SSD CrystalDiskMark v6.0.0 x64 PCMark Storage Bench 2.0 SiSoftware SANDRA

IOMeter I/O Subsystem Measurement Tool

As we've noted in previous SSD articles, though IOMeter is clearly a well-respected industry standard drive benchmark, we're not completely comfortable with it for testing SSDs. The fact of the matter is, though our results with IOMeter appear to scale, it is debatable whether or not certain access patterns, as they are presented to and measured on an SSD, actually provide a valid example of real-world performance. The access patterns we tested may not reflect your particular workload, for example. That said, we do think IOMeter is a reliable gauge for relative available throughput with a given storage solution. In addition there are certain higher-end workloads you can place on a drive with IOMeter, that you can't with most other storage benchmark tools available currently.

In the following tables, we're showing two sets of access patterns; a custom Workstation pattern, with an 8K transfer size, consisting of 80% reads (20% writes) and 80% random (20% sequential) access and a 4K access pattern with a 4K transfer size, comprised of 67% reads (33% writes) and 100% random access. Queue depths from 1 to 32 were tested, though keep in mind, most consumer workloads usually reside at low queue depths...

At QD1, the Intel Optane SSD 905P finished just a touch in ahead of the 900P, but better than all of the NAND-based drives. In fact, the 905P lead throughout here, with the sole exceptions of the 8K/80/80 test at QD8, where it dipped just slightly behind the 900P and the fully-random QD32 test.

If we focus on available bandwidth and latency -- again, at QD1 -- the Intel Optane SSD 905P leads the pack, outpacing the 900P by a small margin.

AS SSD Compression Benchmark Bring Your Translator: http://bit.ly/aRx11n