 SSDs are finally at the point where their costs have fallen and their capacities are so high that they are truly a replacement for the hard drives of YOR. Which raises the question then. What the heck was Intel thinking releasing expensive 58 and 118 gigabyte SSDs for performance enthusiasts in the year 2018? I'm gonna level with you. We're still not sure. But we're gonna walk you through what we do know about the Intel Optane SSD 800P. After this message from CableMod. CableMod Pro Series cables use extra thick wires for a fuller more robust look. Merged terminals on the component side of each cable have been eliminated for a cleaner build. Check them out below. So just like its smaller accelerator siblings, the Optane 800P comes in a standard M.2 form factor which allows it to work as either a normal storage drive in any machine with NVMe or, this is unofficial though, in supported systems as an accelerator for your hard drive. The caveat at this time though is that it only does that on your boot drive. So as enthusiasts around here anyway, we would really like to see more flexibility in the future for applications like booting off of an SSD, like a normal one, and then using a large Optane module to accelerate maybe like a gigantic steam library on a high capacity secondary drive. Of course, Intel isn't marketing the 800P as an accelerator anyway. But that didn't stop us from feeling like we needed to ask, what are these things for then? And their response was kind of baffling. They were like, well, you know, we feel like 58 gigs is big enough for a dedicated boot drive. And I mean, yeah, technically you could install Windows 10 on 58 gigs, but I mean, you'd have spent $130 on a storage solution by that point that wouldn't even have enough additional space left over to store the hibernation file of a high-end system with 32 gigs of RAM these days. Now, 118 gigs is obviously quite a bit better, but even then you're going to have to be giving me a lot of performance to give up three quarters of the capacity that I would get with a decent NAND-based SATA SSD. So let's go ahead and fire it up, shall we? So this is it. This is the Optane experience. We are booted off our 118 gig drive. Let's get some benchmarks fired up here, shall we? So starting with Crystal Disk Mark, at a Q-depth of 8 compared to a Samsung 960 Pro, we're getting slightly higher random reads and then significantly inferior random writes. But at Q-depth 1, Optane's random read performance is over triple. That's really impressive given that this is closer to what most average users would be experiencing in their day-to-day lives. Moving on to performance test, Optane triples the speed of our Samsung and also has significantly lower latency. 8 milliseconds is a full frame delay at 120 Hz, where our SATA SSD is over 2 frames at 60 Hz. Adding a looping file copy in the background, our Optane drive maintains its lead, but not by quite as much. Moving on to Microsoft Word, our averaged scores put Optane in at just over a second lead in load times, with Excel and PowerPoint yielding smaller gains launching from Optane. Though it should be noted that every configuration is fast enough for normal people who don't launch 10 documents at once. Google Chrome launches marginally faster, while Adobe Premiere saw just under a second shaved off its load time. Finally, and this will be unsurprising if you saw our Optane 900p video, Doom, the only big game that would comfortably fit on even our larger module, was hardly different at all. Okay, so in spite of using only two PCI Express lanes versus the four for the Samsung 960 Pro that we used as our benchmark NVMe drive, the Optane 800p's performance is, as the kids say, think, on fleek. So maybe the solution then to our capacity woes is another one? Let's try running them in RAID 0. Alright then, bippity boppity, done. Now compared to a single drive, the numbers look pretty good in our synthetic tests with only slight regressions at a Q depth of 1. Where RAID really shines though is in the responsiveness. Check out that latency, and then even better, check out the max latency while we have our file copy running. That's just over one frame at 240Hz at what I would consider to be an unreasonable load on a boot drive. Unfortunately though, we do see some regressions in most of our program launch tests, with the notable exception of Adobe Premiere, which demonstrates what Intel's been saying all along, that Optane is not about raw throughput, but more about very low latency, which is why you won't find how many megabytes per second it does anywhere on the box. Bringing us then back to our original question. Maybe you can help us answer it. Who is this for? What is it for? At 130 bucks for 58 gigs and 200 for 118 gigs, the pricing is not exactly competitive. It's too small for real professional work, or even mainstream consumer use, and RAID with all of its trade-offs honestly isn't a great solution because it doesn't solve the price. As for the performance, I don't know, sorry guys. I mean this is not like the move from hard drives to SSDs, where I was ending up in like YouTube comment shouting matches with people who didn't get why I was so excited to pay 5x for one-fifth of the capacity or whatever it was. Optane is faster, it is, but the way that Intel's pitching it, it's not faster in a noticeable way, at least not for consumers. The data center is a whole other story. So we've seen other publications talk about using it as a scratch disk in a workstation or something like that. Optane does have higher write endurance than the NAND flash in traditional SSDs, but then in my mind the 900p with its wider interface and much higher capacities is the product for that. Maybe with RAM pricing being what it is, the 800p could make sense as like a cheaper way to expand system memory? I'm not sure about that one either, it sounds like a driver nightmare. Now in the future as prices fall, I will happily take my better system responsiveness, but for now I have a hard time recommending paying the extra for this particular product as a boot drive. So the conclusion then is good technology, great technology, but still looking for a reason why people might want to buy this one. Let us know in the comments if you disagree. Speaking of things to disagree about, the way we integrate sponsors! The Thermaltake P90 is an open-frame tempered glass mid-tower case. It's split up into three compartments for your graphics card, your power supply, and your other cooling components. It's got 5mm thick tempered glass side panels on two sides of the case that let you put your system on display and provides three-way placement layouts, wall mountable, horizontal laying, and vertical standing. It's got seven drive bays with modular drive trays and high liquid cooling expandability. Check it out today at the link in the video description. So thanks for watching guys, if you disliked this video you can hit that button, but if you liked it hit like, get subscribed, maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link below. Also linked down there we'll have our merch store which has cool shirts like this one, as well as our community forum which you should totally join. Quiet on set. Cut.