Intel Optane SSD 905p Learnonlinee

The Optane SSD 900P launch left us scratching our heads as one question lingered. What happened to the LED version that appeared in a leaked slide several months prior to our review?

Over the weekend, several new Optane SSD SKUs and their images appeared online at Newegg, Tiger Direct and many other online stores. The LED add-in card version was among the new products that also see a name change to Optane SSD 905P.

The limited performance and capacity of the Optane SSD 800P makes it a poor starting point for an enterprise Optane M.2 drive, but the controller on the P4800X and 900P is too large for an M.2 drive. Intel has previously faced similar challenges with their flash-based enterprise NVMe SSDs being ill-suited for the M.2 form factor, but their second generation controllers produced the low-power SSD DC P4501. Intel has now managed to scale down the packaging of their high-end Optane SSD controller to also fit on a M.2 SSD. The controller on the P4801X uses the same 7-channel architecture as the P4800X and 900P, but peak performance will be lower due to the power and thermal constraints of M.2 drives. The samples at Intel's booth were 375GB drives, matching the introductory capacity of the P4800X by using seven quad-die packages of 3D XPoint memory, where the first P4800X used 28 single-die packages spread across both sides of the half-height half-length add-in card.

Today, Intel announced the Intel® Optane™ SSD 800P, the latest addition to the growing Intel® Optane™ technology family of products. The 800P joins the Intel® Optane™ SSD 900P, designed for enthusiasts and professional users, and Intel Optane memory, an acceleration solution to speed up slower storage, like hard disk drives and SATA SSDs. Intel Optane technology delivers an unparalleled combination of high throughput, low latency, high quality of service and industry-leading endurance.

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Last week at the Open Compute Project (OCP) Summit in San Jose, Samsung's booth included a surprise appearance of a Z-SSD in the M.2 form factor. Samsung has been pitching their Z-SSD SZ985 using Z-NAND memory as a low-latency competitor to Intel's 3D XPoint-based Optane SSDs. The Z-SSD SZ985 has made many trade show appearances over the course of its development, but always in the form of a half-height half-length PCIe add-in card.

That card keeps all 

the interesting components covered by a heatsink, leaving us with little indication of the PCB's layout, but some of Samsung's earlier presentations included renderings showing a very large SSD controller, similar in size to a typical 16-channel controller. Samsung's exhibit at the OCP Summit included a M.2 version of the SZ985, revealing that the controller is in fact the same Phoenix 8-channel controller used on Samsung's other 98x SSDs, including the PM981 client SSD. This controller is also very likely to be used in Samsung's next generation  retail NVMe SSDs, the successors to the 960 PRO and 960 EVO.

The development of a M.2 Z-SSD raises the possibility of Samsung introducing a Z-SSD for the enthusiast consumer market, to compete against the Intel Optane SSD 800P. However, it is likely  can remain quite competitive in the high-end consumer SSD space with another conventional MLC-based SSD to replace the 960 PRO. Sacrificing further capacity for incremental performance gains would probably not be worthwhile, even though a Z-SSD doesn't go as far down that road as Optane SSDs.