Gadgetory

SSDs are finally at the point where their costs have fallen and their capacities are so high that they are truly a replacement for the hard drives of your which raises the question then what of the heck was Intel thinking releasing expensive 58 and 118 gigabyte SSDs for performance enthusiasts in the year 2018 I'm gonna level with you we're still not sure but we're gonna walk you through what we do know about the Intel octane SSD 800 P after this message from cable mod K blog Pro Series cables use extra thick wires for a fuller more robust look merged terminals on the component side of each cable have been eliminated for a cleaner build check them out below so just like it's smaller accelerator siblings the opt-in 800 P comes in a standard m dot two form factor which allows it to work as either a normal storage drive in any machine with nvme or this is unofficial though in supported systems as an accelerator for your hard drive the caveat at this time though is that it only does that on your boot drive so as enthusiasts around here anyway we would really like to see more flexibility in the future for our applications like booting off of an SSD like a normal one and then using a large octane module to accelerate maybe like a gigantic steam library on a high-capacity secondary drive of course until isn't marketing the 800 P as an accelerator anyway but that didn't stop us from feeling like we needed to ask what are these things for them and their response was kind of baffling they were like well you know we feel like 58 gigs is big enough for a dedicated boot drive and I mean yeah technically you could install Windows 10 on 58 gigs but I mean you'd have spent a hundred and thirty dollars on a storage solution by that point that wouldn't even have enough additional space left over to store the hibernation file of a high-end system with 32 gigs of ram these days now a hundred and eighteen gigs is obviously quite a bit better but even then you're gonna have to be giving me a lot of performance to give up 3/4 of the capacity that I would get with a decent NAND based SATA SSD so let's go ahead and fire it up shall we so this is it this is the opt-in experience we are booted off our 118 gig drive get some benchmarks fired up here shall we so starting with crystal disk mark at a key depth of eight compared to a samsung 960 Pro we're getting slightly higher random reads and then significantly inferior random writes but at Q depth one obtains random read performance is over triple that's really impressive given that this is closer to what most average users would be experiencing in their day-to-day lives moving on to performance test op team triples the speed of our Samsung and also has significantly lower latency eight milliseconds is a full frame delay at 120 Hertz where our SATA SSD is over two frames at sixty Hertz adding a Lucan file copy in the background our op tain drive maintains its lead but not by quite as much moving on to Microsoft Word our average scores put-up tay ninh at just over a second lead in load times with excel and powerpoint yielding smaller gains launching from obtain though it should be noted that every configuration is fast enough for normal people who don't launch ten documents at once Google Chrome launches marginally faster while Adobe Premiere saw just under a second shaved off its load time finally and this will be unsurprising if you saw our opt-in 900p video doom the only big game that would comfortably fit on even our larger module was hardly different at all okay so in spite of using only two PCI Express Lanes versus the four for the samsung 960 pro that we used as our benchmark nvme drive the octane 800 piece performances as the kids say think on fleek so maybe the solution then to our capacity woes is another one let's try running them in raid 0 alright then bippity Boppity done now compared to a single drive the numbers look pretty good in our synthetic tests with only slight regressions at a key depth of one where raid really shines though is in the responsiveness check that latency and then even better check out the max latency while we have our file copy running that's just over one frame at 240 Hertz set what I would consider to be an unreasonable load on a boot drive unfortunately though we do see some regressions in most of our program launch tests with the notable exception of Adobe premier which demonstrates what Intel's been saying all along that obtained is not about raw throughput but more about very low latency which is why you won't find how many megabytes per second it does anywhere on the Box bringing us then back to our original question maybe you can help us answer it who is this for what is it for at a hundred and thirty bucks for fifty eight gigs and 200 for a hundred and eighteen gigs the pricing is not exactly competitive it's too small for real professional work or even mainstream consumer use and raid with all of its trade-offs honestly isn't a great solution because it doesn't solve the price as for the performance I don't knows sorry guys I mean this this is not like the move from hard drives to SSDs where I was ending up in like YouTube comments shouting matches with people who didn't get why I was so excited to pay five X for one-fifth of the capacity or whatever it was octane is faster it is but the way that intel's pitching it it's not faster in a noticeable way at least not for consumers the data center is a whole other story so we've seen other publications talk about using it as a scratch disk in a workstation or something like that obtained does have higher write endurance than the NAND flash in traditional SSDs but then in my mind the 900p with its wider interface and much higher capacities is the product for that maybe with Ram price being what it is the 800 peak who would make sense as like a cheaper way to expand system memory I'm not sure about that one either it sounds like a driver nightmare now in the future as prices fall pull I will happily take my better system responsiveness but for now I have a hard time recommending paying the extra for this particular product as a boot drive so the conclusion then is good technology great technology but still looking for a reason why people might want to buy this one let us know in the comments if you disagree it's making of things to disagree about the way we integrate sponsors the Thermaltake p90 is an open frame tempered glass mid tower case it split up into three compartments for your graphics card your power supply and your other cooling components it's got five millimeters thick tempered glass side panels on two sides of the case that let you put your system on display and provides three-way placement layouts wall mountable horizontal laying and vertical standing it's got seven drive bays with modular drive trays and high liquid cooling expandability check it out today at the link in the video description so thanks for watching guys if you 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