Intel Looking to Increase Capacities of 900P SSD, According to Official Document

[Raevenlord]

Intel seems to be looking to further expand its lineup of the 900P SSD, according to an official Intel document the folks at myce.com got access to. The file, a Product Change Notification (PCN), is usually used by Intel to denote revisions or new products for their manufacturing facilities. And the PCN 115990 - 00 lists increased capacities of 960 GB and 1,5 TB for their 900P SSD.

The newly listed products aren't the only things of note here, though. There have also been some label changes, and reduced voltages across the board. The retail box label will now also include the firmware version the unit ships with, which will definitely come in handy in case there is a known bad batch in these SSDs (as unlikely as that is to be).



View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[dicktracy]

Good. Was looking at 2tb 960 Pro but this sounds better.

 

[NC37]

Probably cost you your first born....

Better come with another SC ship so that it's an adequate trade.

 

[HopelesslyFaithful]

okay... is this the XPoint SSDs or is this the NVME drives? maybe its 3 am and i am too tired and distracted from listening to reason.com Remy parodies to understand this. I honestly dont get the point. or the importance...can someone break this down barney style for me???

it is getting hard to keep track of the 100s or 1000s of different CPUs, SSDs, HDD, GPUs, and so on from cell phones, servers, computers, and so on so forgive me :/

I have binned desktops, servers, cellphones, nicnacks and so on. So hard to keep up lol

 

[londiste]

okay... is this the XPoint SSDs or is this the NVME drives? maybe its 3 am and i am too tired and distracted from listening to reason.com Remy parodies to understand this. I honestly dont get the point. or the importance...can someone break this down barney style for me???

900p are Optanes, so XPoint NVME SSDs

Good. Was looking at 2tb 960 Pro but this sounds better.

2TB 960 Pro can be had for around 1100€, 512GB is 295€ and 1TB is 550€.
480GB 900p is 570€
XPoint is twice as expensive as NAND SSDs

 

[HopelesslyFaithful]

900p are Optanes, so XPoint NVME SSDs


2TB 960 Pro can be had for around 1100€, 512GB is 295€ and 1TB is 550€.
480GB 900p is 570€
XPoint is twice as expensive as NAND SSDs

I have a 512GB 950 PRO since release...really want XPoint but waiting for better controllers or RAM slot based XPoint for OS drive. The controller is holding back XPoint and the memory slot SSD is like 5x slower than memory IIRC off my head according to slide which is pure game changing for OS/program drives.

and yes a hilartious and awesome song*...roccking out to some mead wine

 

[Nokiron]

I have a 512GB 950 PRO since release...really want XPoint but waiting for better controllers or RAM slot based XPoint for OS drive. The controller is holding back XPoint and the memory slot SSD is like 5x slower than memory IIRC off my head according to slide which is pure game changing for OS/program drives.

This...does not make much sense at all..

 

[RejZoR]

Big SATA SSD or medium sized NVMe are still the best option. Problem with Optane is ridiculous price and quite frankly, it's not that much faster than SATA SSD's unless you really need raw bandwidth. Latency gap between HDD and any SSD is massive. But within SSD, it's hardly noticeable in real world conditions.

What would be the most interesting thing is price drop for NVMe. If they can drop these to 600€ for 2TB (talking fastest models, not some bottom of barrel crap), it's gonna be hot stuff. High capacity and speed. And you can stick it into motherboard so it doesn't take any extra space like SATA drives. Optane will be very viable in 5+ years. Sooner, not so much, quite frankly...

 

[dj-electric]

24W SSD. That's pretty toasty

 

[R0H1T]

24W SSD. That's pretty toasty

I'm glad someone noticed, also as Rejzor said latency isn't that big of a thing as it's made out to be
This thing's totally unsuitable for anything portable it seems, as well as anyone looking to save power.

 

[wrathchild_67]

Big SATA SSD or medium sized NVMe are still the best option. Problem with Optane is ridiculous price and quite frankly, it's not that much faster than SATA SSD's unless you really need raw bandwidth. Latency gap between HDD and any SSD is massive. But within SSD, it's hardly noticeable in real world conditions.

The real benefit is the much higher 4KB read IO/s at queue depth 1 and overall write endurance. I was skeptical at first until I saw the benchmarks. These things have database storage written all over them. They're currently too small to use for game storage and they're pretty expensive to use as an OS drive. From those that do own one, I've heard many say they can feel a difference in speed when it's used as the OS drive compared to even a 960 EVO which would be down to the QD1 speed.

 

[cyrand]

Two benefits of 900P I don't often see mention in these discussion is

1) The amount of free space on drive does not affect performance

and more importantly in my eyes

2) Does not require garbage collection to work efficiently which means you will not see the same kinds of performance degradation over time that is often seen in many other SSD's.

 

[RejZoR]

The real benefit is the much higher 4KB read IO/s at queue depth 1 and overall write endurance. I was skeptical at first until I saw the benchmarks. These things have database storage written all over them. They're currently too small to use for game storage and they're pretty expensive to use as an OS drive. From those that do own one, I've heard many say they can feel a difference in speed when it's used as the OS drive compared to even a 960 EVO which would be down to the QD1 speed.

Because 1PB+ of writes on standard SSD's isn't enough? That's how much Samsung 850 Pro 2TB's were able to be written on before starting to fail. Also, forget about the useless benchmarks. If you do what people normally do with computers, you wouldn't be able to tell a difference between fastest 900P and a casually capable SATA SSD.

 

[wrathchild_67]

Because 1PB+ of writes on standard SSD's isn't enough? That's how much Samsung 850 Pro 2TB's were able to be written on before starting to fail. Also, forget about the useless benchmarks. If you do what people normally do with computers, you wouldn't be able to tell a difference between fastest 900P and a casually capable SATA SSD.

Why are you against X-Point memory? It will force traditional SSD controller manufacturers to innovate and compete with these new Intel drives if they want to be considered in the high end workstation and server space. Those innovations will make it down to standard consumers since SSD product lines are largely unified. About the only place that Optane doesn't do amazingly is in RAID scenarios, but even then it's still faster than RAID nvme drives. If I had the money for a 960GB 900P, I'd buy one over the equivalent Samsung nvme drive. 4KB random read speed increases on SSDs have been glacial generation over generation. Intel just gave the whole industry a wake up call.

 

[RejZoR]

Who ever said I'm against it (if you look back I was hugely enthusiastic of what it might bring in the future)? I'm just saying it's not feasible at the moment. Small capacities and insane prices. Even M.2 NVMe's are for the most part ridiculously priced for the capacities. But they don't outrun old SATA drives by all that much to be worthy dumping so much more money into them. Which is why SATA drives are still very much the shit at the moment. Just like I dumped for most, an insane amount of money into 850 Pro at 2TB capacity (800€). But considering 2TB is my sweet spot and has been for years, it creates a huge jump in performance over HDD that I had. It's a long term investment. If we spend 800€ on graphic cards that become outdated in 2 years and obsolete in 4-5, a speedy high capacity drive that will serve me twice as much (10 years) without actually deprecating in performance all that much is well worth it in my books. 900P on the other hand, imagine it as NVIDIA Titan V. It's way too expensive for little benefits it brings to the table. That's why. But like I said, in 5+ years, things may change and so would my opinion on their drives. Per user cases may make it feasible even today. If you need insane amount of writes and latency is important for your usage or even for NVMe's, the raw throughput, that's something else. But I'm sure people are smart enough to evaluate that for themselves. But for general public, my predictions generally stand true.

 

[HopelesslyFaithful]

This...does not make much sense at all..

how so?

Big SATA SSD or medium sized NVMe are still the best option. Problem with Optane is ridiculous price and quite frankly, it's not that much faster than SATA SSD's unless you really need raw bandwidth. Latency gap between HDD and any SSD is massive. But within SSD, it's hardly noticeable in real world conditions.

What would be the most interesting thing is price drop for NVMe. If they can drop these to 600€ for 2TB (talking fastest models, not some bottom of barrel crap), it's gonna be hot stuff. High capacity and speed. And you can stick it into motherboard so it doesn't take any extra space like SATA drives. Optane will be very viable in 5+ years. Sooner, not so much, quite frankly...

you obviously have no clue what your talking about so I got you a graph since your clueless.

Also this is PCIe so whenever these start going into memory channels it will be 40 times faster (see chart above). You can clearly see where 250ns will fall.

Not even comparable and it'll get better with a better controller that is designed for it. They re-purposed an older controller and never made a controller specifically for Optane. And when this gets into memory channel or attached to a SOC the performance is be ~40x better.

The endurance, steady state, 4K and below, mixed work loads, and more are not even comparable to an SSD.

 

[StrayKAT]

Two benefits of 900P I don't often see mention in these discussion is

1) The amount of free space on drive does not affect performance

and more importantly in my eyes

2) Does not require garbage collection to work efficiently which means you will not see the same kinds of performance degradation over time that is often seen in many other SSD's.

Wasn't going to mention this myself. I'm happy with mine, but totally understand the price concerns. It's pretty steep. I suppose mine in particular also had a nice perk of getting a Star Citizen ship model too.. but that's relatively minor.

 

[RejZoR]

@HopelesslyFaithful
Your name suits you perfectly btw... just because something has 100x lower latency on paper, that doesn't mean it in any way reflects that in real world. Which shows it's YOU who doesn't have any clue. Sorry, but it's the reality.

HDD's are one group. SSD's are another. The gap between each is huge, but within each group, we're talking gradients and specific loads that may or may not show noteworthy benefits. Just like 5400 RPM, 7200 RPM and 10k RPM HDD's show gradients in performance, the same is within SSD's from crappy basic models up to top of the line Optane drives. The gap between HDD and SSD is huge, but once you're within that group, you really need very specific loads to show greater differences. And for casual users, there just aren't any even between SATA and Optane M.2 PCIe drives. What difference does it make having 5GB/s bandwidth if loads don't even really saturate SATA? Or 100x lower latencies where you never saturate IOPS capabilities enough to even make it matter?

 

[Pure Wop]

@HopelesslyFaithful
Your name suits you perfectly btw... just because something has 100x lower latency on paper, that doesn't mean it in any way reflects that in real world. Which shows it's YOU who doesn't have any clue. Sorry, but it's the reality.

HDD's are one group. SSD's are another. The gap between each is huge, but within each group, we're talking gradients and specific loads that may or may not show noteworthy benefits. Just like 5400 RPM, 7200 RPM and 10k RPM HDD's show gradients in performance, the same is within SSD's from crappy basic models up to top of the line Optane drives. The gap between HDD and SSD is huge, but once you're within that group, you really need very specific loads to show greater differences. And for casual users, there just aren't any even between SATA and Optane M.2 PCIe drives. What difference does it make having 5GB/s bandwidth if loads don't even really saturate SATA? Or 100x lower latencies where you never saturate IOPS capabilities enough to even make it matter?

Who says that 900p cares about "casual users"? 900p is excellent in 4k low depth read and without degradation. That might be enough to justify for professional use. Plus it is the first generation.
"casual users" can't tell difference in Xeon/EPYC processors (probably worse due to clock speed), or Tesla/Titan V cards, or ECC memories, etc. That doesn't mean they are illogical options.

 

[HopelesslyFaithful]

@HopelesslyFaithful
Your name suits you perfectly btw... just because something has 100x lower latency on paper, that doesn't mean it in any way reflects that in real world. Which shows it's YOU who doesn't have any clue. Sorry, but it's the reality.

HDD's are one group. SSD's are another. The gap between each is huge, but within each group, we're talking gradients and specific loads that may or may not show noteworthy benefits. Just like 5400 RPM, 7200 RPM and 10k RPM HDD's show gradients in performance, the same is within SSD's from crappy basic models up to top of the line Optane drives. The gap between HDD and SSD is huge, but once you're within that group, you really need very specific loads to show greater differences. And for casual users, there just aren't any even between SATA and Optane M.2 PCIe drives. What difference does it make having 5GB/s bandwidth if loads don't even really saturate SATA? Or 100x lower latencies where you never saturate IOPS capabilities enough to even make it matter?

This affects casual users in many ways as well. Plenty of programs lack the ability to use high que depth or are coded well like AV/AM and this also affect numerious other programs as well that allows for a more rapid system just as why i always get a binned CPU with the fastest single thread because a slew of other programs lack the ability to use hardware to their fullest due to lazy/shoddy programming. The goal here is sub second response times which is actually extremely noticeable. (IBMs study stopped at 300ms but you can easily see and benefit from 50ms and below responses...I have actually tested this.)

Additionally, this drive has much better QoS vs any other SSD. It also allows you to get away with an actual filly encrypted OS. I noticed many difference from going to my 480GB Extreme Pro to my 950PRO. No longer bothered with OPing (I still should but I dont...there is still a difference in responsiveness). AV/AM were drastically faster due to 4K being 3 times faster if i recall off my head but they are still bottlenecked due to bad programing on MBABM/Norton/Kaspersky's part. Install speeds are faster and there were less hangs with multitasking.

All of those and plenty of more things were noticeable one an Extreme Pro vs 950PRO.....XPoint were make a huge difference. Xpoint in RAM....dear mother of technology. I want it.

Also I post this every time someone says something stupid like what you said but I am sure they rather relish their ignorance than read scienfic studies from 35 years about that are law of how the human brain works.

https://jlelliotton.blogspot.com/p/the-economic-value-of-rapid-response.html

Also nice red hearing with my name. Shows you have zero intelligence since you resort to that instead of posting some some factual data or responses. Don't worry I actually have a real study that shows you don't know what your talking about.

 

[R-T-B]

It also allows you to get away with an actual filly encrypted OS.

You are aware Samsungs drive are always hardware encrypted at all times, right?

 

[RejZoR]

@HopelesslyFaithful
Lol, dude, whatever. Go rush and buy that 900P for 3000€ and then run Sudoku on it. Coz you'll benefit tons from it and I'll be clueless with my "ordinary" SSD...

 

[HopelesslyFaithful]

You are aware Samsungs drive are always hardware encrypted at all times, right?

yes...i totally will trust that hardware encryption to secure my data....because the NSA (and every other government) hasnt bought off or forced companies with a monoply on force to make it riddled with back doors. RDRand and nemerous other examples exist.

@HopelesslyFaithful
Lol, dude, whatever. Go rush and buy that 900P for 3000€ and then run Sudoku on it. Coz you'll benefit tons from it and I'll be clueless with my "ordinary" SSD...

another logical fallacy....willful ignorance is bliss as always.

 

[R-T-B]

yes...i totally will trust that hardware encryption to secure my data....because the NSA (and every other government) hasnt bought off or forced companies with a monoply on force to make it riddled with back doors. RDRand and nemerous other examples exist.

This is irrelevant to the performance point I was trying to make...

And besides, Opal mode is pretty well regarded actually, I'm surprised you attack it so vehemently. I mean that "software encryption" you hold so dear can be intercepted on the CPU too if you want to get REALLY paranoid... At some point you need to call it quits and realize the NSA probably isn't concerned with you.

 

[HopelesslyFaithful]

This is irrelevant to the performance point I was trying to make...

And besides, Opal mode is pretty well regarded actually, I'm surprised you attack it so vehemently. I mean that "software encryption" you hold so dear can be intercepted on the CPU too if you want to get REALLY paranoid... At some point you need to call it quits and realize the NSA probably isn't concerned with you.

You do realize you should always use many different forms of security? I don't just use a single type of encryption. I use several.

Also your last statement is kinda dumb but i dont feel like going off topic.