Intel Optane SSD 900P Offers Stunning Linux Performance

The Intel 900P SSD U.2 280GB NVMe SSD was being tested with the TYAN Transport SX TN70A-B8026 equipped with an AMD EPYC 7601, what a lightning combination of storage and processor power.

This initial testing was done with Ubuntu 17.10 x86_64 from the Linux 4.14 kernel. Additional follow-up tests with this 900P SSD on Linux is being carried out looking at the impact of different file-systems with this high-performance storage among other interesting kernel/tuning tests.

Among the other drives I had available at the time for testing on this Tyan 2U EPYC server for this comparison included:

Seagate ST2000DM006-2DM1 - A 2TB Seagate Barracuda 7200RPM HDD with 64MB cache just as a reference point for those relying upon standard hard drives.

Crucial MX300 CT525MX3 - A consumer SATA 3.0 SSD for reference with it being rated for 530MB/s sequential reads and 510MB/s sequential writes.

Samsung 850 PRO - A Samsung 859 PRO SATA 3.0 SSD with V-NAND memory rated for "professional performance and endurance" albeit rated for 520~550MB/s reads and writes.

Samsung 950 PRO - The PCI-E NVMe SSD with N-NAND memory promising reads up to 2,200MB/s and 900MB/s writes.

Corsair Force MP500 - A lower-cost NVMe SSD but one we have found to offer the best performance for the price and is rated for up to 2,300MB/s reads and 1,400MB/s writes while having a 175TB write endurance... compared to the 5.11 petabyte endurance rating on the Intel 900P SSD.

OCZ TOSHIBA RD400 - Another one of the higher-performing NVMe SSDs with a 592TB rating and speeds at up to 2,600MB/s for reads and writes up to 1,600MB/s.

Intel MEMPEK1W032GA Optane 32GB - A 32GB Intel Optane M.2 NVMe SSD... The older Optane Memory intended to act as a cache. For our testing we just treated the 32GB SSD as a storage device for benchmarking. The MEMPEK1W032GA is rated for reads up to 1350MB/s and writes up to 290MB/s... As we've shown in past Optane Memory benchmarks, the MEMPEK1W032GA really just performs well for reads due to its use-case of serving as a cache. This Optane device has just a 182.5 TB endurance rating by Intel.

Each of these drives were formatted with EXT4 and tested using the Ubuntu 17.10 + Linux 4.14 EPYC system. All of these disk benchmarks were done via the Phoronix Test Suite.