Intel Shows Off Its 380GB 905P Optane M.2 SSD At Computex
Intel announced and then demonstrated at Computex 2018 the awesome power of a 380GB Optane SSD 905P in a M.2 22110 (22mm wide, 110mm long) form factor that will come to market before the end of the year. The announcement was light on details, but we've already uncovered most of Intel's secrets prior to the 905P add-in card launch.
To demonstrate the new SSD's capabilities, Intel showed two systems side-by-side while they encoded the same video. One system utilized the Optane SSD 905P while the other used a 760p, Intel's flagship flash-based SSD. It's difficult to see in the picture we snapped from the event, but the Optane SSD fed the CPU data fast enough to utilize 82% and the GPU (also used to process data) 86%. The SSD 760p with flash memory and a Silicon Motion, Inc. SM2262 controller only allowed the CPU to utilize 13% and the GPU 17%.
We're not able to give you the rendering time for the high resolution 40 second 4K video clip because Intel shut the display down before the 760p finished. The Optane system took just 17 seconds to finish; the 760p system was slightly less than halfway through the workload.
On stage, an Intel representative said the 905P M.2 SSD would ship before the end of the year. We suspect the company will aim for the Flash Memory Summit time frame in August, but then again, we could have these drives in our hands before the end of the month. Intel has been very aggressive with Optane Technology, more so than we ever expected. The 900P, 905P, Optane Memory, and 800P M.2 SSDs hit the scene like a landslide. We hope the company also builds a smaller, more affordable drive that fills the gap between the 118GB 800P and 280GB 900P that currently sells for around $370.
Regardless of when it debuts, if you are a performance enthusiast, this is the storage technology you want in your system. You can read our review of the 905P add-in card here.
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dudmont There's still a lot of optane neysayers(I'm not one of them), and I suspect price, more than performance, is the reason. Any ideas when prices will drop a smidge?Reply -
NinjaNerd56 I just bought an HP game tower with a 32GB Optane board in front of a 2TB HDD.Reply
Wow. Just stupidly fast.
My work laptop is a monster ThinkPad with a SATA SSD and the tower just smokes it in even simple tasks like opening Outlook.
I knew it would be good, but it’s actually better than I expected.
And for games? Everything loads and runs faster.
Now I want my main storage to be Optane 9XX. They get to 1TB and larger while improving price, and it’s a no-brainer.
Seriously impressed. -
CRamseyer I'm glad you two like it and are vocal about it. I took a lot of flack for saying how great Optane technology was all the way back on the Optane Memory (cache) launch. Several reviewers on launch day even tore into me about it. The technology is really good. For the money, the cache drives are excellent. The full size drives just take it to another level.Reply -
Eximo Just a matter of fit for purpose. I thought the cache drives were a little silly since you needed such a new platform to get them. Made sense for OEMs that didn't want to trade capacity for speed, but not much for the enthusiasts with even slightly dated motherboards.Reply
I could be convinced to move my boot drive to Optane and keep the NVMe drive for bulk game installs or something. All depends on the price/capacity. If it stays where it is, probably makes more sense to get a 2TB M.2 SSD instead.