Intel's exotic Optane SSDs are undoubtedly still the most responsive SSDs ever created, with low-QD random read and write speeds, not to mention latency, that easily slays any SSD on the market (see our benchmarks below). Intel famously killed off its future Optane development, but the drives are still available, albeit typically at eye-watering pricing. Today, that pricing hill has become significantly easier to climb, with Newegg offering the 1.5TB Optane 905p Series SSD for only $339, a savings of $280.
Yes, that works out to roughly 23 cents per GB, which is very high relative to today's cheap flash SSDs that can dip as low as five cents per GB. However, Optane's advantage comes from its ultra-fast and ultra-endurant 3D XPoint tech.
Intel's Optane Memory drives are hands-down the fastest SSDs in certain tasks, laying waste to competing NAND-based SSDs in nearly every conceivable latency and low-QD random read/write metric - but they are more expensive and come in smaller capacities. That means you'll want to use it primarily for a boot drive while using a standard flash-based SSD or a hard drive for bulk data storage.
Granted, you'll probably need to be a storage aficionado to appreciate this drive, though — I personally have three 960GB Optane drives in my daily system, so I can attest that they still offer unrivaled loading times and snappiness compared to standard SSDs. However, this drive is mostly intended for use in servers for write-heavy applications. Otherwise, you should only select this drive if you're fully aware of its eccentricities.
As you can see in our SSD benchmark hierarchy, we've tested hundreds of new SSDs. The Optane 905p tops out at 575K/550K random read/write IOPS, which isn't as high as the one million+ IOPS touted by the latest flash SSDs. But as you can see in the chart above, none of them can match the Optane 905p in our QD1 4K random IOPS tests — the best measure of the 'snappiness' of your drive in everyday tasks, like OS and application loading. It isn't even close.
This drive is best known for its ultra-low latency, but it also doesn't match the 12GB/s sequential speeds we see with the latest PCIe 5.0 flash drives, instead delivering up to 2,600 MB/s of read/write throughput over its older PCIe 3.0 x4 connection. However, sequential throughput has no real impact on day-to-day operating system usage, which is where this drive truly shines.
The Optane 905p is also nearly indestructible, at least in terms of write endurance — the drive can absorb 27.37 petabytes of data over the five-year warranty, which works out to over ten full drive writes per day. That's leaps and bounds ahead of standard flash SSDs.
If you aren't slotting this into a modern server, you'll need a conversion kit to turn either a PCIe slot or an M.2 port into a solution with a U.2 connector. Here are a few examples of those types of devices, like a riser card or an M.2 converter, that I use in my own system. Yes, that's a lot of pricing and complexity hoops to jump through to get access to what is an admittedly older SSD, but it remains among the top performers in key metrics, making it worth it for certain uses.
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