Performance Focus – SSD 800P 58GB

These results came in nearly identical to the 118GB capacity, so I'm repeating what I said there and will split the appropriate hairs when describing the comparison charts later on.

A quick note on this focus page: While this test suite evaluates performance at varying levels of fill, then weighing results based on more realistic contents present on the SSD and avoiding artificially inflated fresh-out-of-box results seen with NAND flash products, this had zero impact on Optane. 3D XPoint does not seem to care about what has been written when, instead behaving with a consistency more closely resembling RAM. While we still ran the standard suite on Optane, there was no noticeable delta between an empty drive and a full one.

Normally I only show Burst performance here, but I'm including both bursty and saturated workload performance to demonstrate that the 800P doesn't really care either way. Sequentials exceed the specified 1200 MB/s handily, reaching 1.4GB/s at QD2 and higher.

Continuing with the burst vs. saturated plots, the 800P does well, rapidly climbing to a maximum of 400,000 read IOPS and over 150,000 write IOPS. The spec of 250k read @ QD4 is not reached in this result, but that is due to Intel's spec being based on fewer worker threads at play compared to how we measure. A single worker can likely hit 250K IOPS at QD4, so long as it does not peg its associated core in doing so.

As will become clearer when we get to the comparison charts, these plots always look backward for Optane SSDs. NAND SSDs typically offer faster random writes since the request is considered complete after the SSD controller has acknowledged the IO (even though it is not fully committed to flash at that point in time). This trick doesn't work for reads, so NAND SSDs will typically fall off towards the right of the above chart. Not so for Optane – its strongest trait is lightning fast random read response times, and that shows here.

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