What’s the story with Optane?

I am using Intel SSD Optane 900P PCIe in my HomeLAB as ZIL L2ARC drives for TrueNAS, but in July of 2022 Intel announced their intention to wind down the Optane business. I will try summary information about Intel Optane from Simon Todd presentation.

My HomeLAB benchmark Optane 900P -TrueNAS ZIL L2ARC with HDD

Optane help a lot with IOPs for RAID with normal HDD. I reach 2,5GB/s peak write performance.

Writer Report – iozone -Raz -b lab.wks -g 1G – Optane 900P -TrueNAS ZIL L2ARC with HDD x-axis File size in KB; z-axis MB/s

Writer Report – iozone -Raz -b lab.wks -g 1G – Optane 900P -TrueNAS ZIL L2ARC with HDD

We call see great write performance for 40GB file size set about 1,7GB/s.

# perftests-nas ; cat iozone.txt
        Run began: Sun Dec 18 08:02:39 2022

        Record Size 128 kB
        File size set to 41943040 kB
        Command line used: /usr/local/bin/iozone -r 128 -s 41943040k -i 0 -i 1
        Output is in kBytes/sec
        Time Resolution = 0.000001 seconds.
        Processor cache size set to 1024 kBytes.
        Processor cache line size set to 32 bytes.
        File stride size set to 17 * record size.

              kB  reclen    write  rewrite    read    reread
        41943040     128  1734542  1364683  2413381  2371527

iozone test complete.
# dd if=/dev/zero of=foo bs=1G count=1
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
1073741824 bytes transferred in 1.517452 secs (707595169 bytes/sec) 707 MB/s

# dd if=/dev/zero of=foo bs=512 count=1000
1000+0 records in
1000+0 records out
512000 bytes transferred in 0.012079 secs (42386853 bytes/sec) 42 MB/s

Intel® Optane™ Business Update: What Does This Mean for Warranty and Support

As announced in Intel’s Q2 2022 earnings, after careful consideration, Intel plans to cease future development of our Optane products. We will continue development of Crow Pass on Sapphire Rapids as we engage with key customers to determine their plans to deploy this product. While we believe Optane is a superb technology, it has become impractical to deliver products at the necessary scale as a single-source supplier of Optane technology.

We are committed to supporting Optane customers and ecosystem partners through the transition of our existing memory and storage product lines through end-of-life. We continue to sell existing Optane products, and support and the 5-year warranty terms from date of sale remain unchanged.

Get to know intel® optane™ technology
*Source Simon Todd – vExpert – Intel Webinar Slides*

What makes Optane SSD’s different?

NAND SSD

NAND garbage collection requires background writes. NAND SSD block erase process results in slower writes and inconsistent performance.

Intel® Optane™ technology

Intel® Optane™ technology does not use garbage collection
Rapid, in-place writes enable consistently fast response times

Intel® Optane™ SSDs are different by design
*Source Simon Todd – vExpert – Intel Webinar Slides*

Consistent performance, even under heavy write loads
*Source Simon Todd – vExpert – Intel Webinar Slides*

Model	Dies per channel	Channels	Raw Capacity	Spare Area
Intel Optane SSD 900p 280GB	3	7	336 GB	56 GB
Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X 375GB	4	7	448 GB	73 GB
Intel Optane SSD 900p 480GB	5	7	560 GB	80 GB
Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X 750GB	8	7	896 GB	146 GB

The Optane SSD DC P4800X and the Optane SSD 900p both use the same 7-channel controller, which leads to some unusual drive capacities. The 900p comes with either 3 or 5 memory dies per channel while the P4800X has 4 or 8. All models reserve about 1/6th of the raw capacity for internal use Source

Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X / 900P Hands-On Review

Wow, How is Optane fast …

The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X is slightly faster than the Optane SSD 900p throughout this test, but either is far faster than the flash-based SSDs. Source

Author: Daniel Micanek