Review: Intel Optane P5800X 1.6TB Retains Random-Performance and Endurance Edge

The drive uses 3D XPoint, the phase-change memory that Intel and Micron developed, rather than NAND flash. According to the review, 3D XPoint changes the resistance of chalcogenide material to store bits and supports byte addressing, so it can overwrite data without first erasing a block. That physical difference underpins Optane's low latency, stable random performance and very high endurance, the review says.

Intel announced in its second-quarter 2022 financial report that it would wind down Optane. Micron sold its Lehi, Utah, fab, the only volume 3D XPoint plant, to Texas Instruments, and the Optane line ended without a PCIe 5.0 product, according to the review. The PCIe 4.0 family included the P5800X, P5801X, P5810X and P5820X. The review cites a claim that the P5800X and P5801X use second-generation 3D XPoint, while the P5810X and P5820X returned to first-generation material, doubling die count at the same capacity and raising power while reducing performance.

The P5800X 1.6TB was released in the fourth quarter of 2020. Intel rated it at 7,200 MB/s sequential read, 6,200 MB/s sequential write, more than 1,500K IOPS for 4K random read and write, and under 6 microseconds of 4K random latency. The review says its 100 DWPD endurance rating translates to 292 PB written over a five-year warranty period, more than 240 times the 1,200 TBW rating of a common 2TB consumer SSD. The review also points to a long-running test of a 16GB Optane M10 that wrote nearly 300,000 full-drive volumes over more than three years and continued to work.

New China-market P5800X 1.6TB drives had sold for about 30,000 yuan, and secondhand units for more than 10,000 yuan, the review says. A recent batch on Xianyu, a secondhand platform, brought 400GB versions to just over 1,000 yuan and 1.6TB versions to about 4,200 yuan. Most of these drives were retired from overseas data centers, with 20,000 to 30,000 power-on hours and five to six PB or more of writes, and they come in multiple firmware versions. The tested unit had firmware L0310200, NVMe 1.3c support, more than 23,000 power-on hours, nearly 5 PB written and 98% health remaining.

The P5800X uses a 2.5-inch, 15mm black aluminum case and a U.2/SFF-8639 connector, which does not fit a standard SATA backplane. It has one temperature sensor and a rated 22W power draw, and the review recommends active airflow for ordinary users. The test used a PCIe 4.0 U.2 adapter card.

The test platform used an Intel Core i9-14900K, an AORUS Z790 XTREME X motherboard, DDR5-8000 16GB x2 memory, an Intel Optane 900P 480GB system drive and Windows 11 Professional 23H2 and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. The review notes that PCIe Maximum Payload Size affects sequential results: AMD consumer platforms support 512 bytes, while Intel platforms support 256 bytes, so Intel-platform PCIe 4.0 sequential tests are limited to below 7,200 MB/s. AMD platforms, however, are weaker in low-queue random performance and latency, so the review used Intel.

In CrystalDiskMark, the drive reached 7,144 MB/s sequential read and 7,055 MB/s sequential write. Its Q1T1 4K random read exceeded 440 MB/s; Q32T16 4K random read and write each exceeded 1,500K IOPS; and 7-read/3-write mixed random performance exceeded 1,927K IOPS. Q1T1 random read and write latency stayed below 10 microseconds in Windows, and mixed-scenario latency was stable, the review says. The review cautions that CrystalDiskMark writes a 1 GiB test file and immediately reads it, so NAND drives can gain from SLC cache or controller pre-read; because the Optane drive has no SLC cache, its result reflects the drive's real behavior.

The drive scored 9,332 in PCMark 10's full system drive benchmark, 13,280 in its data drive benchmark, 9,123 in 3DMark's storage benchmark and 85.44 in SPECworkstation 3.1, according to the review. In a QD32 128K sequential write test covering twice the drive's capacity, it held about 6,740 MiB/s without the sharp drop that NAND SSDs can show after SLC cache exhaustion, the review says.