Intel announced its first market ready Optane products at the end of January, its low capacity (32GB) Cache SSDs. On Sunday the corporation released its first high capacity Optane SSD drive; the DC P4800X with 375GB of storage. According to PCWorld, this $1520 drive will be joined by a version with 750GB of storage in Q2, and a 1.5TB model in H2. Intel's Optane SSD DC P4800X range is aimed at enterprises and fit in PCI-Express/NVMe and U.2 slots.
Ahead of this larger capacity Optane SSD release, Intel had been hyping the storage performance of the technology as being up to 10X faster than a conventional flash SSD. It often refers to Optane as "a storage solution that behaves like system memory".
In new benchmarks published (PDF) by Intel, the performance gain isn't so large or clear cut. These tests of the shipping product show that the first Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X "delivers 5-8x faster performance at low queue depth workloads, exhibiting extremely high throughput for single accesses and super low latency".
Other strengths of the Optane SSD DC P4800X series are; responsiveness under load, predictably fast service (60x better than a high-endurance NAND SSD), and ultra high endurance with extended life.
The above cases show that the Optane SSD DC P4800X series offers the kind of performance that is ideal for data centres and the acceleration of enterprise applications, says Intel. The drive series should enable users to increase the size of data sets to bolster 'big data' calculations. Its affordability means that Intel Optane SSDs are likely to displace some DRAM in servers.
As reported by PCWorld, the new Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X 375GB model costs $1,520 and is available now. The price tags for the larger capacity members of the series, coming later in 2017, weren't divulged.
