Intel Optane 900p SSD Released in AIC and U.2 Form Factors

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Waldek

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Apr 3, 2016
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Just wanted to share my buying experience - for people leaving in Europe who want to buy the Intel 900p drive for a normal-ish price - I have recently bought the 480GB version at overclockers.co.uk. It cost me 600 GBP (VAT included) plus 21 GBP shipping via DHL to Poland. Ordered on Tuesday 7th of November evening and the drive arrived on Thursday 9th morning. Their website still lists 10+ availability (and other models). Just by comparison one of the largest IT parts shop in Germany - mindfactory.de - claims 1000 EUR with no delivery date.

Cheers,
Waldek
 
T_Minus

T_Minus

Build. Break. Fix. Repeat
Feb 15, 2015
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msi 270 sli+ motherboard
intel i7-7700k cpu
2x 8GB DDR4 ram
1x 280gb Optane (2.5" with m2 adapter & P3700 2.5" cable, I didn't use cable that came with optane FWIW)
1x Samsung 250gb EVO SATA (not plugged in currently to make sure I installed Win10 on correct drive)
onboard video

The system is barebones right now while I update/install my software then I'll migrate my 980 TI gfx card as well as a 512gb random SATA SSD I have, and an Intel 750 400GB NVME with Funtin adapter will be the final setup, need to get win10 lic. key off it first though :D


This is replacing my E5-1620 V3 system, not really an upgrade just a side-step to save power... although if it doesn't save power/improve much of anything I may keep the 1620 v3 system for the PCIE lanes and if I recall more cache, we'll see :)!
 
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am4593

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Feb 20, 2017
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Hilarious. I am basically making the same move for basically the same reason. Getting out of a xeon e5 v3 1620 and moving over to 1151 mostly for power savings, and a slightly higher clock; with a 280GB 900P as a boot drive. I do consider it all an upgrade though. if you dont need cores and excessive amounts of ram its a solid move.
 
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T_Minus

T_Minus

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Boot-up seems noticeably faster than my Samsung 950 Pro but that could always be the motherboard.
I see the BIOS screen for a split second then I get windows login. Not that I reboot a lot :)

Going to play a game later and see if i notice any FPS increase.
 
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S-F

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Feb 9, 2011
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So what's the consensus?
there was so much talk about Optane and now that it's out nobody is saying anything. Any opinions?
 
JDM

JDM

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Jun 25, 2016
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@S-F It's pretty awesome, I have mirrored Optane 900P's in my "lab" hypervisor at home running 14 VMs, not even breaking a sweat. Rebooting a VM almost looks like a network blip as it comes back so fast. The database guys at work love it, and I'm trying to work it into the budget as metadata disks for some of our file systems at work.
 
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S-F

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Has anyone seen any benefit to them in a desktop environment? Boot times, game load times, etc. Not that I play video games at all. Just curious. On the whole reports are that there is very little to no noticeable difference between a good SSD and NVME.
 
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am4593

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Feb 20, 2017
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S-F said:
Has anyone seen any benefit to them in a desktop environment? Boot times, game load times, etc. Not that I play video games at all. Just curious. On the whole reports are that there is very little to no noticeable difference between a good SSD and NVME.
Click to expand...
Of course. These are killer drives. I boot windows 10 on an X11SAT with one of the 900P and I boot windows 10 on a Gigabyte GA-Z270-HD3 also with a 900P.

Both systems are super responsive with these drives. The Z270-HD3 system boots to windows in less than 4 seconds. Thats power button into windows, less than 4 seconds. The X11SAT takes longer, around 10 seconds. Server hardware never boots fast.
 
BackupProphet

BackupProphet

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Jul 2, 2014
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Those of you with Optane, have you tried benchmarking when you overcommit memory.

For example lets say you test system with 8GB, 16GB and 32GB of RAM and fire up several VM's that use total of 64GB of ram, so it has to write to swap. Will a system with 8GB and Optane be more responsive than a system with 16GB and a regular SSD?
 
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i386

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Mar 18, 2016
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@BackupProphet good question :D

For the bigger enterprise optane devices Intel offers software ("INTEL Memory Drive Technology SW", intel pn#: MEMDRVOPT640GB) that allows the os to access/use the optane ssds like ram.

Edit: removed shop link from copy/paste
 
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BackupProphet

BackupProphet

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I guess that will work better than virtual memory. For example it is well known that Linux has a huge memory management overhead when you overcommit. We have seen that when using Varnish. FreeBSD on the other hand, has a minor performance penalty when you overcommit memory.
No idea about Windows.
 
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S-F

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am4593 said:
Of course. These are killer drives. I boot windows 10 on an X11SAT with one of the 900P and I boot windows 10 on a Gigabyte GA-Z270-HD3 also with a 900P.

Both systems are super responsive with these drives. The Z270-HD3 system boots to windows in less than 4 seconds. Thats power button into windows, less than 4 seconds. The X11SAT takes longer, around 10 seconds. Server hardware never boots fast.
Click to expand...

4 seconds? I'm sold. It's high time for me to build a new system, and this one is going to be Optane powered.
 
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