Intel Optane 800p SSD Benchmarks On Ubuntu Linux

Last month Intel launched the Optane SSD 800P series as a step below the ultra-fast Optane 900P solid-state drives but still a big step ahead of other SSD options like the Intel 760p series. Here are our first Linux performance benchmarks of the Optane 800p series with testing the 118GB SSDPEK1W120GA 800p SSD on Ubuntu.

We were curious how well the Optane SSD 800P series would work on Linux and while we had not received any review sample unfortunately from Intel, now that the 58GB and 118GB drives are widely available, I recently ordered the SSDPEK1W120GA for putting it through its paces under Linux. This M.2 NVMe SSD with 3D XPoint memory is rated for sequential reads up to 1450MB/s, sequential writes up to 640MB/s, random reads up to 250k IOPS, and random writes up to 145K IOPS.

The idle power draw of this high-performance PCI-E 3.0 3D XPoint SSD is just 8mW or 3.75 Watts under load. Intel backs the 800P SSD with a five-year warranty and a 365 TBW endurance rating and 1.6 million hours MTBF.

The Intel Optane SSD 800p drives are cheaper than the 900p line-up, but still a premium over other M.2 NVMe SSDs and especially SATA 3.0 SSDs. I picked up the 118GB NVMe 3D XPoint 800p model for $198 USD from NewEgg.

This round of NVMe SSD Linux benchmarking happened using a daily development snapshot of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS while on the Linux 4.15 kernel and using an EXT4 file-system on each drive being tested. The test system was comprised of an Intel Core i9 7980XE, ASUS PRIME X299-A motherboard, 16GB of DDR4-3200MHz memory, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060, and the respective SSDs being tested.

The selection of drives I had available for this round of benchmarking included the:

- Corsair Force MP500 120GB as a modest NVMe SSD that retails for about $66 USD.

- OCZ Vector 150 120GB as just a basic, low-end SATA 3.0 SSD for reference.

- Samsung 950 PRO 256GB as a higher-end NVMe SSD that retails for about $170.

- Intel 600p SSDPEKKW256G7 256GB as an older Intel NVMe SSD.

- Intel 760p SSDPEKKW256G8 256GB as another current Intel NVMe SSD option.

- The Intel 800p SSDPEK1W120GA 118GB Optane 800p drive being tested as the focus of this article and retails for just under $200 USD.

- The higher-end Intel 900p SSDPE21D280GA 280GB that is retailing for about $390 USD.

- The Intel Optane MEMPEK1W032GA 32GB drive being treated as just a normal SSD and not as a caching device, for reference purposes.

On this assortment of solid-state storage devices running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS x86_64 with the Linux 4.15 kernel, a variety of I/O benchmarks were run using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.