Intel Optane SSD 800P - Review 2022

Intel'south Optane storage technology, unveiled last yr, offers lightning-fast memory and hard drive options for both enterprise users and enthusiasts building their own PCs. The latest addition to the Optane family is the 800P SSD ($129), which finally brings the technology to the One thousand.2 drive format that is becoming ubiquitous on laptops and desktops. If you're edifice a tricked-out gaming rig or looking for the absolute fastest SSD to serve as your new kick drive, the 800P should be high on your consideration listing. However, information technology suffers from its loftier price and depression chapters, drawbacks that it shares with the other Optane drive released and then far, the 900P.

Two Sizes, Too Small

The Optane 800P is available in two sizes, our 58GB review unit of measurement or a $199 118GB version. These are shockingly depression capacities in a world where even midrange ultraportable laptops now come up with 512GB SSDs, and a clean install of Windows 10 requires 20GB or so. The depression capacity conspicuously positions the drives every bit repositories for your operating organisation files and not much else, which means you lot'll need to pair it with another drive to shop all of your files.

To understand why you lot'd want to prepare upwards a dual-drive configuration with Optane ways taking a deep dive into Intel's new 3D XPoint (read: "cross-point") memory technology that'south more than suited to an electrical engineering science textbook than a consumer tech publication. For the purposes of this review, we'll simply explicate it equally Intel'south proprietary storage format that differs from other more than mutual SSD technologies in means that the company is mostly keeping confidential. What nosotros do know about Optane is that when you send a request to access information stored on your bulldoze, Intel's storage controller, acting equally a sort of banker or librarian, retrieves it from a unmarried cell of 3D XPoint retentiveness, rather than the blocks of cells (called pages) that concur memory in a NAND-based SSD.

The speed gains from this new process depend on how many storage requests you are making, of class. Since typical PC tasks like opening and endmost applications don't require tons of simultaneous requests, Intel is touting significant speed gains over other SSDs, which themselves are much faster than the hard disks that they have mostly replaced. The question is whether the Optane 800P'due south performance is and so much ameliorate than already-screaming drives like the Samsung SSD 960 Evo that it's worth the significantly higher cash outlay and the chapters constraints.

Blistering App-Loading and Boot Times

The Optane 800P is indeed fast, as its results on our PCMark 7 storage criterion demonstrate. The benchmark spits out a proprietary score based on simulated everyday tasks in Windows, like launching apps, manipulating images, and watching videos. The Optane 800P'south PCMark vii score of 6,224 ways that information technology is faster non only than the Editors' Choice 960 Evo (5,872), only also Samsung'due south more than expensive 960 Pro (half-dozen,099). Information technology even beats the astronomically expensive Intel SSD 750 Series (5,879), a 1.2TB non-Optane SSD that nosotros reviewed every bit an external drive sold by Akitio.

In other words, the PCMark seven results appear to validate Intel's boasting. If you're into building your own gaming or general-use PCs and don't mind dealing with a dual-drive configuration to compensate for the Optane 800P'southward measly capacity, you can remainder assured that this bulldoze will be a primal ingredient in a super-fast build.

Some anecdotal real-world testing confirms this. It took me just viii minutes to install Windows x Home onto a blank Optane 800P from an external USB three.0 SSD. In a testbed with a seventh-generation Intel Core i5 processor, the Optane SSD consistently took less than 4 seconds from the boot screen to the Windows desktop. Your kicking times volition likely be slower one time yous install your antivirus and other software, but the fact remains that the Optane 800P is lightning fast at the types of activities that historically have been large bottlenecks.

That all changes if you're considering using this drive in a server or other surroundings where it volition be subjected to multiple simultaneous admission requests. To simulate these conditions, we apply the Crystal Diskmark software to test a drive's read and write performance when information technology's processing a big number of requests, a situation that engineers refer to equally a long queue depth. (Based on internal testing, Intel claims that typical cease user PC tasks involve queue depths of about iv).

At a queue depth of 32, the Optane 800P recorded read speeds of 633MBps and write speeds of 576MBps. That's slower than the 960 Evo (688MBps read, 601MBps write) and the SSD 750 series (683MBps read, 601MBps write). These results demonstrate that Optane drives are great at what they're marketed to do—offering blistering performance on mutual calculating tasks—but they're not quite as versatile as competing drives from Samsung and others based on the more mutual NAND compages.

Consider Waiting for Higher Capacities

If you're in the midst of building a haemorrhage-edge PC, Optane storage is for you. In addition to the new 800P, there's also a 900P that comes in a PCIe x4 add-in card grade factor, which is significantly bigger and more expensive, merely boasts capacities up to 480GB. This ways you lot accept lots of options if yous're willing to put in some tinkering time. You could buy several 800P drives, potentially configuring two of them in a RAID array, or you could employ a single 900P.

Intel Optane SSD 800P 2

If you lot adopt an easier, more capacious, and less-expensive setup, you lot could also wait until Intel introduces college-capacity versions of Optane storage in an 800P form cistron. The company won't annotate on upcoming products, but during a recent conference, an executive said that higher-capacity M.ii Optane drives are an "obvious next step."

Yet a 3rd option, assuming you are installing a motherboard with Optane retentivity support, is choosing a conventional SSD like the 960 Evo and opting for an Optane memory module instead. These modules take the same 3D Xpoint technology, but they piece of work their magic past improving RAM performance, instead of streamlining storage requests. Optane memory is also the least-expensive entry indicate into Optane engineering, with a 16GB module costing $44.