Optane 905P - Still Worth it as an OS Drive?

Zarathustra[H]

Zarathustra[H]

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And since many will argue that the elevated price is never worth it, let me define what I mean by "worth it".

One of the best consumer drives on the market currently is the Samsung 980 Pro.

By worth it, I mean, if I am going to pay the premium for a 960GB Optane 905p drive, which is going to cost about 3x more than a 1TB Samung 980 Pro, am I going to get anything for it? We all know incremental performance at the top end does not scale linearly. What I am interested in knowing is, if I want excellent performance at any price, is a 905p going to be better than 980 Pro?

The 980 Pro will have the benefit of higher sustained transfer speeds on large sequential files, in part due to its parallelism and in part due to the Gen 4 support.

The 905p - on the other hand, while limited to Gen 3, and with lower sequential transfer speeds at least used to have the killer low latency and high IOPS performance that was great for things like OS drives.

If money weren't an issue, do you think one would be better off with a 980 Pro or a 905p as a boot/OS drive.

Or maybe even something else?

I'd appreciate peoples thoughts.
 
Whilst both have amazing things going for them at the end of the day if you had two machines with them in them I doubt 99 times out of 100 you'd know which was which.

With super fast storage it's been a law of diminishing returns for day to day usage once we broke the 500MBps barrier in my opinion. Obviously you can afford it but maybe do what I did* instead, just buy the 108GB version and us that as a super low latency cache drive or something.

That or think of something more fun and noticeable you'd enjoy with the cash?




* I just used the 16/32 Optanes for that.
 
No regrets on my 900p as OS and primary program drive. It spends more time on the BIOS screen than loading Windows/getting to the desktop. Is it better than the 980 at that? Can't say. I can only compare to the couple regular NVMe drives I have in other systems, but they don't have to load as much on startup and have slower CPUs, too. But I can say that my Windows updates go very quickly compared to the other systems; the random write dominance really shines, there.

The reliability will be better all around, I think, being essentially a rebadged enterprise drive, not that the endurance difference will be particularly relevant to most people. Someday when 4800X/5800X drives go for extra cheap on the 'bay, I'll buy them up like we did with the fusionIOs for boinc/other PCs since I'll be able to easily move them into newer systems for years.
 
Really depends on how much capacity and desktop load. I can tell you this...running Hyper-V the 1.5TB version absolutely smoked any other nvme drives used. They are expensive but there's a reason for it. If used for what intended for they are worth every penny, period. For casual desktop beater/gaming just toss in any Phison nvme (except QLC) and go. In our case with VM checkpoints, the other drives' performance tanked when their SLC cache was filled. What would be drool worthy is 100TB of SLC with a lot of lanes providing similar bandwidth as DDR3! :)
 
I liked mine so much I bought a 5800x to replace it. The consumer drives were basically rebadged enterprise drives. I love the reliability, the insane low latency and never having to worry about endurance. In my use case the drive will have some sort of physical failure before the media wears out. It is a damn shame that this technology never reached the economy of scale needed to be profitable in the consumer or enthusiast space.

The latency is unmatched by anything short of ram drives. I have always been a snob for latency, buying 10k+ RPM HDD's for my OS drive back in the day and putting up with the jet engine in my case. Too many people get hung up on big sequential numbers. For boot/OS drives latency is king.

I have never had such a smooth and responsive windows experience than on optane drives. When not working I have my top few steam games and MMO clients on the optane drive. I can swap them out guilt free all the time and never worry about wearing it out.

As with anything, the value proposition is for everyone to decide for themselves.
 
If you're not using it to make money it's not worth it. If you're actually doing stuff that leverages the drive it'll be a huge deal, otherwise not so much.

Any PCI-E NVME SSD will be smoking fast. The better IOPS and access latency won't be felt with just normal desktop OS workloads, or even gaming, as FWIW MS and game developers optimize things to lean heavily on sequential reads.
 
I too upgraded from an Optane 900p 280 GB to an Optane DC P5800X 800 GB. Unfortunately the real-world performance of the P5800X in games and on the desktop is identical to Phison E18 PCIe 4.0 drives like the FireCuda 530 and Corsair MP600 XT.

The 900p destroyed my old Samsung 950 Pro in performance even on the desktop. Sadly that's not the case anymore with the latest SSDs. The difference is too small to warrant the expense.

I'm planning to move the P5800X to my TrueNAS server as an SLOG + L2ARC device and use the FireCuda 530 as my boot drive.
 
Yeah I'm getting 6770MBps out of a £120 drive in my laptop alone! Things move on.
 
daglesj said:
Yeah I'm getting 6770MBps out of a £120 drive in my laptop alone! Things move on.
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They do, but sequential performance isn't everything.

In fact, when it comes to responsiveness and load and boot times it is a much less important performance metric than other measures of responsiveness, like small random reads/writes and IOPS, and that is one area in which Optane has traditionally excelled compared to other SSD's.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
They do, but sequential performance isn't everything.

In fact, when it comes to responsiveness and load and boot times it is a much less important performance metric than other measures of responsiveness, like small random reads/writes and IOPS, and that is one area in which Optane has traditionally excelled compared to other SSD's.
Click to expand...
Does anyone care about boot times anymore? I mean even on a SSD they're extremely fast.
 
A little late to this convo...

So, I have an 970 Pro in my laptop, and it's been nothing special other than a few noticeable coding things that are pretty fast from time to time compared to my old SSD desktop. Honestly, I'm kind of pissed at it since it corrupted my last linux install. I had an eGPU and on Linux and a laptop constantly being plugged in and unplugged, an eGPU is not a good thing (hard lockups/freezes, completely instant power offs, etc). The 970 Pro took about 1.5 years of that, until Linux finally couldn't recover. Honestly though, I did beat the crap out of it - writing/importing GBs of DBs, and instant power off.

But it's a night and day difference when compared to my Optane 905P desktop. It's hard to compare exactly though... M.2 NVMe 970 Pro in a 6-core 8th-gen 35W Xeon laptop w/2666 ECC ram versus an AMD 5950X @ 5Ghz all cores, 128GB 3200Mhz ECC - oh and an 905P 960GB. It's a new machine so I'll need to expand storage sometime (hopefully a 2nd 905P 960GB). Compilations are near instant - which I am sure the 32T destroys over the Spectra-mitigated crippled 8th Gen 6-core 35W. Finally!! I've been asking for years why are things so slow even with SSDs.

For Intel 900P/905P, look to eBay for used ones. With such an massively insane endurance, you're rarely ever find one with less than 97% remaining.

I've been picking up 480GB versions for around $220/$250 and 960GB versions for ~$520. You have to sit and wait for the deals. Hell, a brand new U.2 905P 960GB just sold for $540. I was going to get it; but, I have too many of these right now... The most worn one I have is 98% remaining, which is about 8.5 PB (yeah, I'll never hit that). Oh, and they all still have warranty! (Intel confirmed it on all of them)

So yeah, the cost is worth it to me over a 980 Pro.

This is the time to setup alerts and subscribe, since they just went EOL.

And now for my rant on SSDs. It took me nearly 10 years to figure out how I was killing SSDs: I write too damn much. Between TBs of data imports and ansible for setting up servers (churning 1/2 dozen VMs in integration tests, or rather a dozen containers created and destroyed), and the TBs of movies and TVs I used to copy on a weekly based for my 4 hour round-trip train commute (daily!), I was just writing so much.

These days, I just shoot for high endurance enterprise drives (SSDs, NVMe in U.2, M.2, and HHHL) and have yet to ever have an issue again. Hence, why my desktop has 905Ps in it (and each server, as my ZFS ZIL and I'm about to enable Persistent L2ARC on the remaining space of the Optane drive!).


I just wish I could find an M.2 2280 Enterprise drive with super-caps... I'm spoiled now with Ceph and ZFS, and the 970 Pro is the only flash drive I own that doesn't have super-caps (and I have nearly 30 SSDs and NVMe).

EDIT: Ignore my signature, I haven't posted in nearly a 1/2 decade. It's outdated...
 
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I actually bought an 960GB Optane 905p a while back to use for a project on my server that never materialized, so today I decided to play around with it a little and installed i in my desktop, and imaged my boot drive over to it.

The drives have pretty poor sequential speeds by modern standards, but those low queue depth 4k random reads are a thing of absolute beauty.

Intel Optane 905p 960GB (4x Gen3) (possibly sabotaged by being my boot drive during test, and Win11 seemingly always hammering the boot drive)
Intel_Optane_905p_960GB.png


Lets compare this to the other more common drives in my machine right now:

Samsung 990 Pro 2TB (4x Gen4)
Samsung_990_Pro_2TB.png




Samsung 980 Pro 2TB (4x Gen4)
Samsung_980_Pro_2TB.png



Samsung 970 Evo 1TB (4x Gen3)
Samsung_970_Evo_1TB.png


So, as you can see, despite being the slowest sequential drive here, compared to the 990 Pro, it is over 4x faster at low queue depth 4k random reads.

It has always been my theory, that for typical client workloads, this is the performance measure that really matters, and that really does seem to be holding up.

All of this is subjective though.

- OS and program launches do feel a little snappier, but once the system has been up for a while, everything is cached in RAM anyway I guess.
- Traditional full boots (not fastboot / hibernate) are MUCH faster on the Optane than on my 990 Pro
- Fastboot hibernate boots feel about the same.
- Windows update installs go by in a fraction of the time that they take on my 990 Pro, which doesn't make any sense looking at the write speeds, so I can't explain it, but they do.
- Closing a VM and dumping the RAM to disk (suspend to disk) takes a couple of seconds longer than it does with the 990 Pro. As does resuming that VM from disk again.
- Starfield runs much more smoothly. That game absolutely hammers the drive non-stop, and it can lead to stutter with the 990 Pro, which is mostly absent with the Optane

Wendell at Level1techs did a video on this a few months ago. The performance difference can be quite astonishing:


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSUMBeaaiOo

In my subjective testing, running around New Atlantis in Starfield is WAY smoother on my Optane 905p than on my Samsung 990 Pro, but that game is probably an outlier.

Worth noting is that the AIC / PCIe slot versions of the Optane 905p are CRAZY expensive for some reason. We are talking thousands of dollars. But the U.2 versions, which are essentially the same thing in a different form factor are running for about $300 in new sealed boxes. They come with an m.2 adapter for those who need it.

I used a Startech u.2 adapter card, essentially turning mine into a PCIe version

PXL_20231125_003415756.PORTRAIT.jpg



Is it worth the cost over a Samsung 990 Pro? Probably not. It's going to be A LOT faster at some things, but its also going to be a little bit slower at others.

In the grand scheme of things, considering I already have it, I think I prefer it over my 990 Pro as my boot drive. I may install a handful of disk intense games on it, but Starfield is a real outlier. I don't expect the same kind of benefits in many other titles. I'm keeping my other drives installed in the machine, and I will use them on a case buy case basis, installing the things that benefit the most from extreme 4k rnd speeds without suffering from the lower sequential speeds on this drive, and putting everything else on the others.
 
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I'm thinking about getting an optane SSD specifically for my browser profiles. It's all about seek times.
 
I used a 480GB 900P for many years as a boot drive / main game drive / download scratch location. It was still at 100% life... going to have to make it my boot drive when I move this 5800X3D to my backup PC (its 2TB Firecuda drive, which has decent TBW compared to its peers, is already down to 98% after just a year and 33TBW).

Actually, I just picked up a 1.5TB 905P for a new build. Going to be an OS / primary game drive again!

I kinda wish Optane wasn't going away as well... it was just too expensive & not enough gain for most regular consumers.
 
Optane > everything else. 905Ps can be had for $300. Gen4 P5800Xs can be had for $686.

I’ve got all the things and still swear by Optane for the OS. QD1 4k Random Read is where it’s at for OS performance, period.

Run your games off the biggest, fastest Gen 4 or 5 m.2 flavor of the week.
 
Monstieur said:
It should be noted that enabling BitLocker will drop the QD1 performance to the level of a regular SSD.
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I've never enabled bitlocker (or any disk encryption) on any PC.

I just don't need it.

I'm not exactly going to forget my 100+lb desktop on the train, and if someone is in my house I already have bigger problems to worry about than whether or not my disk is encrypted.

I barely use laptops, and a drive like this wouldn't even fit in a modern laptop.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
I've never enabled bitlocker (or any disk encryption) on any PC.

I just don't need it.

I'm not exactly going to forget my 100+lb desktop on the train, and if someone is in my house I already have bigger problems to worry about than whether or not my disk is encrypted.

I barely use laptops, and a drive like this wouldn't even fit in a modern laptop.
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My only concern is my browser profile with cookies being stolen. Firefox profiles are unprotected and should be moved to an encrypted drive. Edge and Chrome cookies (but not the whole profile) are encrypted with the Windows password so are relatively safe.
 
Monstieur said:
My only concern is my browser profile with cookies being stolen. Firefox profiles are unprotected and should be moved to an encrypted drive. Edge and Chrome cookies (but not the whole profile) are encrypted with the Windows password so are relatively safe.
Click to expand...

Session hijacking is no joke. That is how Linus got his Youtube channel stolen.

That said, if someone breaks into my house and either disassembles my desktop and steals my drives OR runs off with the whole 100+lb thing (I'm not exaggerating the weight. I can barely lift my Corsair 1000D and its overkill water loop. I've hurt my back trying to slide it in under my desk :p ) I feel like I'd notice and be able to sign myself out of all of my sensitive accounts from another device such that the current session is no longer valid.

If you are really concerned though, this seems like the perfect application for a small encrypted virtual drive image just for the browser cache, so you don't slow down everything else.
 
Brahmzy said:
Optane > everything else. 905Ps can be had for $300. Gen4 P5800Xs can be had for $686.
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I really want the P5800x 1.6tb U.2, but $2k is the cheapest i found it. I really hope it reaches around $1k, and ill jump the wagon.
 
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