It's on fire sale, 7 hours left. Comes with U.2 to M.2 adapter cable.
The best price I have ever seen.
It may be the last few of Optane 905P on Newegg. Probably it will be gone for good when these stocks are depleted, since Intel has terminated Optane last year.
Intel Optane. The main advantage is its random read / write performance in heavily multi-task situations or for a server.
Basically, if you have a situation where you need to do something that requires a fair heavy read/write on SSD (large video encoding) AND you also want to do something else in the mean time, this would allow to open additional apps much faster than traditional SSD. However, there are 3 main issues with these making them are hard sell:
This is not an Optane-accelerated QLC. It uses the standard Windows (MacOS, Linux) NVMe drive and works in all CPUs as far as the platform supports NVMe (It's very hard to find one that doesn't support NVMe these days)
End-of-Life (EOL) Announcement for the Intel® NVMe* Drivers for Windows
The Intel® NVMe* drivers for Intel® SSDs listed below have reached end-of-life (EOL) and will no longer be available starting on February 6, 2023. Users are encouraged to use the Microsoft inbox NVMe* driver.
Intel® Datacenter NVMe* Microsoft Windows* Drivers for Intel® SSDs
Intel Client NVMe* Microsoft Windows* Drivers for Intel® SSDs
I initially thought Intel might have also done some extra goodies in those drivers.
@ShrewdBargin: I have a 905P 960G as my system drive and for my code compilation, exactly the model on this page. I mentioned it in another message just below.
@serena-yu: Driver not drive ;) the NVME driver is no longer publicly available wondering if either of you had a copy
Is it really worth it in 2023, compared to latest and fastest Gen4 M.2s?
Not for general applications and gaming. Some have claimed otherwise, but when I swapped my 960 Pro for a 900P (bought cheap) some years back, it had no noticable impact on boot time, Windows snappiness, or game loading and frametimes. And the 905P isn't much faster than the 900P, whereas SSDs have advanced leaps and bounds since the 960 Pro, even though they still fall short of Optane in random access and endurance.
Still have a soft spot for it though - those random access figures in CrystalDiskMark give me butterflies regardless of any real world advantages. If it were a P5800X at this price, I'd be tempted.
I have migrated my system from Samsung 970 pro 1TB to Optane 905P. Windows 11 boot time is about half. I also moved my codebase from Samsung 980 pro 2TB to Optane, and typescript build & test time has been reduced by 1/3.
Nevertheless, for gamers, it gives 0 impact on game fps (upgrade your GPU for that, seriously), and minimal impact on loading time, because most games have optimizations to reduce 4k reads. An exception is probably GTA5's json bug, as it loads a 10MB json file with 1984531500 reads.
Price to performance wise, no, they aren't worth it. It's far better value to get a 980 or 990 Pro. But the Optane small size QD performance is undisputed, nothing can touch it. For those that want the absolute best and don't care about the price, why not?
Will the performance difference be noticeable though, probably not. It would probably shave off 1 or 2 secs when loading your favourite program, may also shave a few secs off a PC boot time. Nothing earth shattering so its very hard to justify it when they are so much more expensive than other NVME drives.
If you see this deal and ask what is optane? Then this is not for you, these are pretty niche products, which provides higher endurance and lower latency than typical NAND flash SSDs.
This is useful for faster boot times (but not necessarily faster loading times for other applications/games). Its also good as a cache for a high workload NAS, or home serve and a good boot drive for multiple VMs.
Thanks for the explanation - concise and useful. Viva Ozbargain.
Intel were always flogging a dead horse with Optane.
All the tech sites were mostly trying to justify its existence as a cache when it was basically useless and expensive.
Optane joins the long long list of failed Intel initiatives where they are slowly squandering their lead and wealth to more agile competitors like TSMC.
Optane is dead. Intel killed off the division, and is selling off the remaining stock of inventory cheap.
An Optane drive is not a bargain at any price. It is certainly not an OzBargain at many times the price of even a gen3 M.2 SSD, let alone a way faster gen4or gen5 drive.
Yup, Optane is now dead, old tech, avoid and save your $.
I don't really know why people are this badly informed. Optane is still by far the most consistently performant persistent storage tech, by quite a margin, even over products generations newer.
It wasn't canned because SSDs could compete with it, it was canned because it was very expensive to make and they had to sell it for less than RAM which is what it's competing with at that end of the market. (RAM being better in all cases bar persistence).
Consumers don't look beyond benchmarks that have crazy high sequential transfer speeds when for most consumers that's a) utterly unimportant b) not usually replicable on the advertised consumer SSDs for a prolonged period etc.
Business users aren't looking at the marketing behind consumer SSDs, they're looking at the WORST case scenario which Optane still performs dozens to THOUSANDS of times better than similarly priced NVRAM SSD's at.
The P5800x series is STILL the ultimate in persistent storage tech. But it's $$$$ and for many use cases people would be better off with more RAM instead. Something the $$$$ market is usually able to stretch to.
The consumer market wants more space and barely notices the advantages so last gen Optane doesn't really have a place in the product line especially as consumer SSDs have become cheaper and Optane never reached the scale required to become cheaper.
Kind of hoping they end up selling off the P5800x series cheap (they've never been and still aren't cheap) because I'm not sure anyone will make storage that good for another decade.
@JumperC: Indeed. If the price it came to market at was competitive with standard SSDs we'd currently look at NAND flash devices the same way we look at spinning rust.
what am i missing here?