Since the early days of SSDs, the storage medium has always been NAND flash memory in its various forms. One of the movements away from this medium has been Intel and Microsoft’s IMFT 3D XPoint storage tech. Since its announcement, we’ve seen various glimpses at its potential at filling the performance and price gap between DRAM and NAND. Luckily for us, the specifications for the new Intel Optane DC P4800X 3D XPoint SSD have just been leaked.
Sadly, the Intel Optane DC P4800X 3D XPoint SSDs that we are getting first are limited to a smallish 375 GB. The drive is in the half-height PCI-Express form-factor, with a PCI-Express 3.0 x4 host interface. The drive manages sequential transfer rates of up to 2400 MB/s reads, with up to 2000 MB/s writes which is pretty standard for a PCIe SSD. The real kicker comes in the latency and random-access metrics with 4k read/writes coming in at 550K and 500K respectively which is insane. That’s about 5x better than the Samsung 950 PRO and should allow for much snappier performance even under heavy sustained loads.
Due to its ability to also act as a DRAM replacement, endurance is off the charts as well. Endurance ratings are about 21x better than enterprise MLC drives, with 30 drive-writes per day (DWPD) and 12.3 petabytes (12,300 TB) total bytes written (TBW). This gives a P/E cycle of about 32800 which means it is practically impossible to run this drive down. I can’t wait to get my hands on one of these to try it out.
