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Intel Optane SSD 800P M.2 PCIe SSD RAID Review

Final Thoughts

We have two goals with any RAID review: Show what’s possible when you combine multiple drives and check how well the drives scale in various setups.

The figures speak for themselves when we talk about what’s possible, you’ve seen that on the previous pages. So I won’t go too much into that, except say that RAID is a fun thing to do. Instead, we’ll talk about the scaling of Intel’s Optane SSD 800p.

As I mentioned earlier, the Optane SSD 800p performs best at low queue depths. However, a lot of our tests deal with higher queue depths in order to keep the consistency to other reviews. That means that it isn’t every test that shows the 800p’s strength equally. But enough of that, let us talk about the real thing.

How Well Does It Scale?

AIDA64’s Storage Benchmark tests the drive setups plain performance without a filesystem to interfere. Here, it becomes clear that Intel didn’t lie when they said that the drives scale great. In the linear tests, we see a 207% scaling in read tests and 195% in writes. In the random tests, we get an impressive 251% scaling when reading and 192% when writing. That’s impressive. We also see in the latency tests that RAID doesn’t really have an impact here. That can easily be the case as the system will have to split data between the drives, but not so for the Optane 800p

In AS SSD’s sequential tests, we get a 196% scaling at reads and 193% at writes. ATTO Disk Benchmark is a clear and to the point performance test where we also see the Optane 800p shine. Here, we get a 202% scaling at reads and 210% at writes.

CrystalDiskMark showed us a 202% read scaling and 201% write scaling at sequential operations, and that is with a high Q32 depth.

Conclusion

Intel did not lie or polish the figures when they told us that the drive scales above 100% in a RAID setup. I’m not fully sure how Intel managed to create better than +100% scaling, but they did. And that is impressive! Granted, the Optane SSD 800P doesn’t achieve this feat in all tests, but that’s a given. A lot of our tests deal with high queue depths and the 800P shines the brightest at low queue depths. But that’s where it matters most for most people, and as such, it’s great. I can’t wait to see what they come up with for the next generation of these drives. Results like the ones we’ve seen today make me hungry for more.