Intel Optane SSD 905P 960GB Drive Review

By Nathan Kirsch

Anvil Storage Utilities

Anvil Storage Utilities 1.1.0

Along with the move to a new platform, we decided to make a change in one of the benchmarks. There’s a relatively new benchmark called Anvil Storage Utilities that is in beta but close to production. It’s a very powerful tool that measures performance through a variety of tests which can be customized. Since some of the tests more or less duplicate what we get from other benchmarks we use already, we decided to use the IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) testing on 4kb file sizes at a queue depth of 1, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 and 128. IOPS performance is something SSD makers tout quite a bit but we generally don’t do a lot of IOPS testing because frankly a lot of users can’t relate to IOPS metrics as well and it tends to be more meaningful to the enterprise/server crowd. Still, it is another performance indicator with relevance and while some drives post good MB/s numbers, their IOPS scores aren’t always commensurate which this test will prove out.

Anvil SSD Benchmark with 100% Compression (incompressible data):

Benchmark Results: The Anvil SSD Benchmark showed that with 100% compression (incompressible data) the Intel Optane SSD 905P 960GB drive had an overall score of 20,481.58 points. The drive topped out at 2,426 MB/s read and 2,048 MB/s write on the sequential performance test with 4MB file sizes. Random 4K QD16 performance hit 466k IOPS on read and 374K IOPS write.

Anvil SSD Applications Benchmark at 46% Compression:

Benchmark Results: With the compression at 46% to help mimic real world applications better we found the overall score was slightly better at 20,921.69 points.

Benchmark Results: When it comes to Random 4K Read performance at various queue depths the Intel Optane SSD 905P 960GB drive can’t be touched by any other models that we have recently tested.

Benchmark Results: The 4K Random Write performance showed that the Intel Optane 905P 960GB drive had the best performance of all the drives again, but the difference wasn’t as large.