Intel Optane 900P

Feeling the need for speed, Jarred Walton takes Intel’s latest storage technology for a Tokyo Drift around the server farms to see what it can do.

- Jarred Walton

Originally slated for release in 2016, Intel’s 3D XPoint technology encountered more than a few delays. That’s not too surprising for a radically new technology, but we worried that when it finally arrived, 3D XPoint would underwhelm. In 2015 Intel said 3D XPoint (pronounced “cross point") would deliver up to 1,000 times the performance, 1,000 times the speed, and 10 times the capacity of traditional NAND. Utilising a x4 PCIe channel limited to 4GB/s, those claims won’t be reached yet − but what about the rest?

Endurance is the easy and most striking example of what 3D XPoint brings to the table. The Optane 900 SSDs are rated at 10DWPD (drive writes per day) for five years. Let’s put that into perspective: Samsung’s 960 Pro line is rated at 400TBW (terabytes written) for the 512GB model, over five years. That means you could potentially write about 220GB per day, every day, for five years before the NAND gets used up.