GoKawiilOnce in a while new hardware is released that makes a difference. Such a device is the Intel Optane series of high-performance SSD’s for professional use, which was released in late 2017. In this case I’m talking about the Intel Optane P4800X and P5800X and their consumer counterparts (900P and 905P). All drives are based on the 3D XPoint Technology that Intel co-developed with Micron.
In contrary to regular SSD’s, Optane drives like the P5800X brings ultra low latency, high durability and high performance to the table. Effectively Optane is a technology that both has aspects of DRAM and regular NAND based Flash. The downsides of Optane are the high cost and relative low capacity. Combined with the high innovation rate of NAND SSD’s and Compute eXpress Link (CXL) around the corner, there was little reason to switch to this pieces of technology for most companies.
Finally, Intel decided to stop the innovation of this technology in July 2022 as part of it’s IDM 2.0 company strategy. In fact, Intel stopped all their flash storage based activities. This does not mean the drives aren’t for sale anymore.
Current Optane based products (in SSD and DIMM form) are still being sold. In the beginning of this year even a new Optane Persistent Memory NV-DIMM series 300 (also called PMEM) was released. This new Optane release was needed for the 4th generation of Intel Scalable CPU’s code name Sapphire Rapids that was released in January 2023.
ServeTheHome made a great video about Optane Persistent Memory if you’re not familiar with it.
The Gear
As part of the VMware vExpert program, I had the opportunity to test a couple of Intel Optane P4800X drives, which I wanted to get my hands on for quite time, being a (hardware) techie. Many thanks to Corey Romero, Matt Mancini, Simon Todd and the Intel Business and Storage BU for making this possible.
Drive specs
Optane P4800X (1st Gen) Optane P5800X (2nd Gen) Capacity 375 GB – 1,5 TB 400 GB – 3,2 TB Release date Q3 2017 Q4 2020 PCIe version PCIe 3.0 (NVMe) PCIe 4.0 (NVMe) Sequential Read 2500 MB/s 7200 MB/s Sequential Write 2200 MB/s 6200 MB/s Read IOPS (4K) 550.000 1.500.000 Write IOPS (4K) 500.000 1.500.000 Durability (DWPD) 30 (Write Intensive) 100 (Write Intensive)
Optane Advantages
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