Intel Optane SSD 905P 960GB Drive Review

Final Thoughts & Conclusions

The Intel Optane SSD 905P series is not going to be a product for everyone. The 905P has incredible Random 4K performance and the 10 drive write per day endurance rating is impressive. The screenshot below shows the Intel Optane SSD 905P 960GB drive reaching 562K IOPS of Random Read 4K performance at QD of 32. The average access time was just 0.057 ms, which is super impressive.

When you test Random 4K read/write performance at QD1 the average access or response time ranges between 0.021ms to 0.023ms. This is most certainly a high-performance drive that will make your system as responsive and as snappy as it can get.

With great speed, comes great price. At $1299.00 shipped ($1.35 per GB) we don’t see many of 99ers running out and buying the 905P 960GB drive. This is more than triple the price of other 1TB PCIe NVMe drives and that makes it something reserved for those that want the best. This is clearly a drive for the discerning enthusiast!

Oh, and before we conclude this review. If you hate blue LED lights you can change the color of them. The colors can be changed to a solid Green, Blue, Red or off. Unfortunately the only way to adjust the colors is to go into the Command Line options in the Intel SSD Toolbox 3.5.2 and later versions. The command line you need to use can be found in the Intel SSD Toolbox user guide. It will be as follows: intel SSD Toolbox.exe” -drive_index # -led_color [red|blue|green|off]. Why there isn’t a simple radio button in the GUI for LED color is beyond us and this drive has been out for several months now.

At the end of the day the 905P is a solid performing drive, but it clearly isn’t for everyone. The price tag for this drive is going to be far too high for most, but if you desperately need to increase productivity and responsiveness then this might be something worth paying for.