After @wendell’s Optane porn and Craft computer and others reviewed the LSI Nytro WarpDrive I made this list of pro/enterprise cache drives. To get in on the list they shouldn’t be silly expensive (I decide what is), it should be low latency (in the μs range), and be able to handle at least 1 PBW . The Optane 905P is silly expensive but listed as a life goal for the other little cache drives. There’s of cause a lot of nvme drives out there that are a lot fast in straight lines but these are all about latency.
Double check numbers, I’ve probably gotten some wrong. The numbers are mostly taken from product booklet so they probably lie. Give me a shout if you see something weird. Since everyone has bought every company at least once a lot of products has been sold under more than one name.
I just ordered one 1.5 TB at $376 over the weekend.
Seeing how a P5800X and 960 GB 905P made it to the list, the 1.5 TB 905P sohuld probably be included as well. The 905P 906 GB is only a two or three Andrew Jacksons cheaper than the 1.5 TB 905P.
Not sure what your criteria are, but there are other drives I’ve been keeping tabs on:
Ok, I admit I added the H20, H10, and M10 Optanes. According to Intel the H20 has a durability of 185 TBW/512GB, but that’s with the QLC flash. Since the Optane part shows up as a P4801X in Windows I’d assume it has an endurance of aboutish 1 PBW. Couldn’t find our what’s in the H10 but I assume it’s the same. The M10 is only 365 TBW, but it has Optane latency. And at the moment the 16GB version are $10 on ebay.
In this video Wendel shows that the part of the H20 shows up as the SSDPEL1K375GA01 in Window device manager, and this paper from Intel shows that the SSDPEL1K375GA01 and the P4801X are the same product in different form factors. I assume the 375GB P4801X is 24 16GB Optane chips with some overhead and it’s 41 PWB, so roughly 1.7 PWB per chip. The H20 comes with 32GB Optane which I assume is two Optane chips with no overhead. The H20 is slower but that’s probably because only x2 PCIe lanes are used for the Optane.
