Intel Optane 900P - The next generation of SSD

On Oct 27, Intel announced the availability of the Optane 900P SSD.  Focused towards the "Enthusiast" market segment, this Non-Volatile Memory drive based on Intel's 3D Xpoint lithography dramatically raises the bar for SSDs in both performance and longevity.

 The 900p will be available in two form factors.  First is a PCIe Card in HHHL CEM3.0 form factor that consumes 1 x PCIe. 3.0 4x slot in a traditional desktop PC.  It will be available in two capacities - 280GB and 480GB.

 The second form factor is a 2.5" "drive" factor that utilizes a U.2 connector.  The 2.5" is only available in the 280GB capacity.

 In either form factor the 280GB will be priced @ $389 and the 480GB @ $599.  

 The specs on the 900p are staggering.  It can support 2500MB/s sequential Read, 2,000Mbps sequential write @ 10us latency and 550,000 IOPS / read or write while only consuming 14W TDP active and 5W idle.

 The 900P can support 5.1PB of lifetime writes, with a MTBF of 1.6M hours and a 5 year warranty.

 Independent testing against drives like the Samsung EVO 960 Pro shows dramatic improvement in both throughput and latency.  In some tests the 900p was over 16 times faster than the 960 Pro - even though both are NVMe drives.

 While NVMe drives have been available for the enterprise market for some time - this technology is now reaching the consumer market at reasonable price points.

 So while not at the price/GB range of NAND based SSD drives - for the performance and longevity it is well work a look.

 The also means the beginning of the end for SATA as the drive interface on upcoming PCs.   In the early days of SSD, OEMs focused on 2.5" form factors with SATA interfaces to allow for easy migration from HDD to SDD.  You could order a new SSD and basically plug it in.  

 The challenge was that the SATA bus was suddenly the bottleneck and you were wasting some of the performance of the SSD.

 In the laptop space - many OEMs then started switching to the M.2 interface and PCIe connectivity vs SATA.  This allowed them to reduce space and avoid power and data cables altogether while supporting greatly improved performance

 For example even my Intel NUC utilizes an M.2 PCIe interface than can support a 2280 form factor NVMe drive.  

 I am looking forward to the new NUC8 series devices that will support the new 8th Generation i7 CPUs and hopefully 650 graphics and this new 900p drive.

 Bottom line is - Intel has released the new 900P NVMe SSDs.  they provide a dramatic performance improvement over current market offerings and are the next step in the SSD evolution.  In the next few years I suspect all PCs, Laptops, etc - will support NVMe storage and the price will drop to the levels we see for NAND based disk today.




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