Intel Optane SSD 905P 960GB Drive Review

Linear Write, File Transfer and Game Load Time Testing

AIDA64 Disk Benchmark

We’ve had some people ask for AIDA64 linear write tests to be done, so we fired that utility up to see what would happen.

When you take a look at extended sustained write performance you’ll see that the performance started out at around 2180 MB/s and remained there for a bit and then the performance dropped down to around 2160 MB/s before recovering. Our best guess is that the drive was doing some garbage collection or maintenance task when it dipped down.

Real World File Transfer

Let’s see how real-world was when writing a movie folder containing seven 1080P movies over to the SSD. For this test, we are going to measure write performance by transferring over a 30.6GB folder of movies off of a PCIe NVMe SSD to the drive being tested to see how performance looks.

The Intel Optane SSD 905P 960GB drive finished our file transfer test with an average speed of 1491 MB/s. This score puts just ahead of the 900P 480GB drive, but still behind several of Samsung’s drives.

Game Load Time Testing

To test game load times we use the Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood Official Benchmark with the game resolution bumped up from the default setting to 1920×1080, which is the most widely used screen resolution by gamers.

The Intel Optane 905P and 900P with 3D Xpoint memory technology are still the fastest drives to have when it comes to game load times. The 905P 960GB drive is 6.7% faster at load times than the HP EX920 1TB SSD. You can pickup the HP EX920 1TB drive for $297.28 shipped, so it will cost you an extra $1,000 to get that performance gain since the 905P 960GB drive is $1,299.00 shipped.