There's been a lot of exciting developments in the SSD space over the past few years, most notably in the creation and proliferation of new form factors like M.2 and NVMe drives. Those solid state storage options are built on a PCIexpress interface, giving them heaps of bandwidth to play with and in return we've seen big spikes in sustained read and write rates. That doesn't always transfer over into real world file transfers or game load times improving, which is why the new Intel Optane 905P is so intriguing.
Built on Intel's Optane memory standard, which is designed to speed up transitions between RAM and SSDs, a little like a high-speed caching drive, but with RAM, Optane memory has been expensive from the start, so you can imagine an SSD powered by it would be too. The 512GB version is around $600, making it noticeably more expensive than 1TB drives from other manufacturers.
But that extra expense could be worth it. A new review from PCGamesN highlights that while its sustained read and write speeds might not eclipse those of NVMe drives, in practice, it performs much the same. Where it really stands apart though, is it in its reliability and random access speed. It's rated for close to nine petabyes of information, where most NVMe drives are only rated for a few hundred terabytes, or at most, a petabyte and a half.
Random 4K file transfers are substantially faster than most drives too, offering read speeds of up to 160MBps. When compared with a Samsung 970 Evo and 960 Pro, that's nearly three times as fast. That equated to faster file transfers too.
Would you pay that bit extra for a noticeably faster SSD?
