Intel Optane SSD 900P Launched With Insane Speeds

By Nathan Kirsch

Just moments ago Intel released the Intel Optane SSD 900P Series aimed at desktop enthusiasts that are looking for the ultimate storage drive. This is the first consumer product from Intel that uses 3D Xpoint Technology what was first introduced by Intel and Micron in July 2015. 3D Xpoint Technology looked to be 1000x faster than NAND and have 1000x the endurance, so we’ve been waiting over two years for a drive to come to market!

Intel Optrane SSD 900P

Intel will be launching the Intel Optane SSD 900P Series drives in two form factors; an Add-In Card (AIC)PCIe Gen 3.0 x4 card and U.2. The U.2 form factor will only have a 280GB capacity version available, while the AIC will be available in 280GB and 480GB capacities. Unlike traditional NAND flash based SSDs, Intel Optane SSDs with 3D XPoint Technology will all perform at the same speeds.

Intel Optane SSD 900p Specs

What speeds are we talking about? How about Sequential Read speeds of up to 2,500 MB/s Write and 2,000 MB/s Read! The 4K Random Read performance numbers top out at 550,000 IOPS and the 4K Random Write numbers are hitting 500,000 IOPS. The endurance on the Optane SSD 900P 480GB drive is an insane 8,760 TBW, which comes out to be 10 complete drive writes per day over the course of the 5-year warranty that Intel has placed on this series. For the 280GB model you are looking at 5,110 TBW. The Samsung SSD 960 Pro 512GB drive has an endurance rating of 400 TBW, so Intel hit a grand slam with endurance thanks to 3D XPoint Technology. Latency speeds is also impressive less than 10uS!

Power consumption on the Intel Optane SSD 900P is rather high, which is why you don’t see a M.2 drive as this isn’t going to be something you want to stick into a laptop. This drive idles at 5 Watts and has a burst power of up to 14 Watts. The average active read power is 8W and the average active write power is 13W.

Intel Optane SSD 900p Future Performance

Intel Optane SSD 900p Rendering Time

Intel wanted to show a real world situation that shows off how good the Intel Optane SSD 900P series performs, so they showed us some Houdini Video Rendering results. Houdini is a rendering program used by many video production companies. We were told that rendering a seven second scene of a maelstrom took 17.4 hours on a Samsung SSD 960 Pro drive and just 6.3 hours on the Intel Optane SSD 900P. So, it takes 2.7X longer on one of the fastest drives on the market today than is did with an Intel SSD 900P installed into the system. Intel also showed that the CPU utilization was higher on their platform, which they took as a good thing as the system utilization was increased by 2.75x. The processor utilization was over 35% on the Intel Optane SSD 900P series versus no more than 15% on the Samsung SSD 960 Pro series.

When it comes to pricing the Intel Optane SSD 900P will run $599 for the 480GB drive and $389 for the 280GB drive. That means you are looking at $1.25 per GB on the 480GB drive and $1.39 per GB on the 280GB drive. The Intel Optane Memory Module 32GB runs $77.99 or $2.43 per GB, so we are excited to see such ‘low’ pricing on the Optane SSD 900P series!

Oh, and we should also mention that Intel will be bundling an exclusive digital Star Citizen EMP powered spaceship called the “Sabre Raven” (available in the 3.0 patch) and a game license with the purchase of an Intel Optane SSD 900P. Good news for those that want to play Star Citizen and nothing of importance to those that do not. Intel teamed up with David Lundell, Director of Strategic Planning at Intel, took the stage at CitizenCon 2947 and announced the Optane SSD 900P series for the very first time.

david lundell

Intel sent out a very limited number of Intel Optane SSD 900P samples and unfortunately we were not one of the lucky sites that got one of them to review. We’ll hopefully have one to check out soon when Intel sends out another wave of samples. For now you’ll have to read a review of the 900P on one of the following sites:

If you want to run out and buy one of the Intel Optane SSD 900P drives we found them available to pre-order at Newegg with an arrival date of 10/30/2017.