Intel 800p Optane SSD: Bleeding-Edge Pain Without The Bleeding-Edge Gain

We love the potential of Optane, but current products aren’t competitive price- or capacity-wise with NAND-based offerings.

- Jon L. Jacobi

Intel’s Optane SSD 800P, like previous Optane products, boasts best-in-class longevity and very fast random access. But the rest of its performance numbers are mundane at best, it’s only available in two very small capacities, and the price is, ahem, up there.

Even die-hard early adopters will experience some sticker shock paying $129 for 58GB or $199 for 118GB, or $2.22 and $1.68 per gigabyte, respectively. Compared to the other NVMe drives in our SSD buying guide (go.pcworld.com/sdbg), which average around 50 cents per gigabyte, the 800P is over-priced and under-powered. After the lightning-fast Intel 900P (go. pcworld.com/o900) we recently reviewed (currently $600 on Newegg [go.pcworld. com/600n]), it’s a real disappointment.

DESIGN AND SPECS

We tested the 58GB version of the M.2, PCIe/NVMe 800P. Both capacities ship in the common 2280 (22 millimeters across, 80 mm long) form factor. There’s not a lot we can tell you about the 3D XPoint memory or Optane controller, other than that the memory is 3D and uses some kind of matrix addressing. Unfortunately, Intel is just not very forthcoming about this promising technology (go.pcworld.com/3dxp).

We already mentioned that the 800P is expensive and not very capacious, but it bears repeating: $129/$2.22 per GB for the 58GB version, and $199/$1.68 per gigabyte for the 118GB version and there are no larger capacities. By way of comparison, the 250GB Samsung 960 EVO is available for $120/48 cents per gigabyte and available in sizes up to 2TB. Ahem.