Final Thoughts and Conclusion

It’s hard to convey to most users just what makes Optane so special. Intel’s Optane SSD DC P5800X is an absolute monster in about any category you can come up with. If you go by typical marketing terms, ‘Maximum Speeds’ are rated as high queue-depth sequential transfers. Previously, Intel Optane drives struggled to compete with these numbers that are unrealistic in most consumer use cases, but not the P5800X. It just about maxes out the practical limit of PCIe 4.0 x4 for sequential reads with speeds clearing 7.4GB/s and writes not terribly far behind. It’s impressive to be sure, but there are a handful of consumer NAND drives out there that can obtain similar numbers, so what really sets it apart?

From an enterprise angle, low latency woven in with very high IOPS means extremely high transactional throughput. This is more user requests served concurrently, with shorter waits and faster completion times. This is the kind of raw storage performance that powers the transition to hyper-converged infrastructure. On a more workstation-oriented use case, the P5800X still stands alone by a wide margin. It’s really the ultra-low latency that makes it stand apart. In-kind, this leads to very high IOPS, even at low queue depth. While it certainly won’t apply to consumers, and even most workstations, the 100 DWPD endurance rating is just unheard of and will allow you to just pound this drive with around 80TB of writes every day, 365 days a year, for five-plus years. That works out to a bit over 3.33TB an hour or 55GB a minute, indefinably, for 5+ years.

Intel…holy $h1+! There isn’t much else to say. It’s expensive, but it stands in a league of its own, and nothing else on the market can touch it.

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