Hacker News Reader

Comment by wmf | Hacker News Reader

ServeTheHome is one of the most honest hardware review sites, especially in the very small field of server/enterprise hardware. AFAIK ServeTheHome is basically advertising for DemoEval which is an independent lab full of servers that you can rent access to. So there's a commercial interest behind it, but it's not Intel.

Here's their policy if you want to believe it: https://www.servethehome.com/about/editorial-copyright-polic...

Looking at Optane specifically, it is just that good. It is 2x-10x better than NAND (at ~2x the price) in certain aspects like mixed read/write or fsync. This is very far from Intel's 1000x claims, but Optane is still worth buying in some cases.

(Also, feel free to call me a paid shill if you want to get deeper in the mud.)

View on HN

I love servethehome, but find their actual reviews (of which TFA is not one) somewhat frustrating.

Most motherboards they review get a rating of 9.something/10.

They provide some interesting insights but often gloss over aspects that I, at least, really care about.

I could go on, but it's easy to criticise. They're the only ones covering a lot of what they cover. And I love their forums.

Twice the price? Optane seems to be solidly over a dollar per GB, while quite good SSDs are in the 3-4 GB per dollar range.

The pricing is doing a lot better, though. The initial wave of Optane parts were above four dollars per GB, getting unpleasantly close to the price of a ramdisk.

2x-10x better when they claimed 1000x isn't "just that good". ESPECIALLY not when the write endurance is so abysmal.

The fact they don't come out and say, in the review, the hardware was furnished by Intel, and instead you have to actively search out the link you just provided, in and of itself is troubling. It's common courtesy and pretty much industry standard practice to list conflicts of interest at the start or end of an article like the one posted...

I think you're tricking yourself into a wrong conclusion. What was promised doesn't matter (to a customer); all that matters is the price and performance.

Ignoring the difference between 3D XPoint memory and Optane-branded products based on that memory is a good way to reach bad conclusions.

But even accounting for that, Intel's definitely not hitting their goals for endurance yet, and the density goal is the only one they clearly have come close to. We won't be able to judge performance until there are 3D XPoint NVDIMMs that get the PCIe bus out of the way.

Write endurance for Optane 900p 280GB 5.11 PB

Write endurance Intel S3700 200GB 10 drive writes per day for 5 years or 3.65PB for 5 years.

Write endurance Intel S3500 240GB 140 TB

So I cannot understand why you think the write endurance is lacking.

Hi tw04 - just as a heads up, none of the SSDs were furnished by Intel. We have a budget and bought all of the drives we used on this test. Some we had to buy second hand, some were scavenged from servers we have had to decommission.

Intel does provide us with hardware, as does AMD, Intel, Toshiba, Samsung, WDC, Cavium and etc. In fact, we have a full list of all relationships here: https://www.servethehome.com/about/editorial-copyright-polic...

Unlike virtually every other major review site (and a large number of bloggers), as of today we still do not have direct ad sales to any of these companies.

We also buy an absolute ton of gear for the DemoEval service we run which is why we have access to many different bits. For example, we have purchased a dozen Optane 900p's already since Intel would not furnish us with a U.2 drive.

Intel does not want to have the 900p eat into the P4800X which is a higher margin product. As a result, this is the kind of article (Optane 900p in servers) that Intel specifically would not want us to do. Since we buy hardware, we can.

> Intel does not want to have the 900p eat into the P4800X which is a higher margin product. As a result, this is the kind of article (Optane 900p in servers) that Intel specifically would not want us to do. Since we buy hardware, we can.

Intel has not to my knowledge actively discouraged or tried to prevent anyone from reviewing the 900p in an enterprise context. They haven't expressed any negative opinion about me including the 900p in my review of the P4800X, even though they provided hardware for both.

I agree that they probably don't want the 900p to hurt the sales of the P4800X, but I don't think they're particularly concerned about that happening. Most potential P4800X customers aren't going to go to the trouble of buying and installing large quantities of 900ps instead.

>Intel does not want to have the 900p eat into the P4800X which is a higher margin product. As a result, this is the kind of article (Optane 900p in servers) that Intel specifically would not want us to do. Since we buy hardware, we can.

That's such a cop out and an inaccurate statement. In the article you make it pretty explicit that the 900p is unfit for production workloads (which I agree with). In what world is someone going to use a device that will lose data on power loss for their write cache?? I don't think Intel is the least bit concerned. You then go on to say the 4800 is a better fit, yet you don't show any performance numbers for it because "You will notice that we do not have P4800X results. We had good results, but off of where we would expect" - so you didn't post them??? I'm sorry, that reeks of you being TOLD not to post them by Intel or your "anonymous benchmark requester" - otherwise you would've posted the numbers with the note that you think they seem off. Leaving them out entirely with no explanation as to why is extremely questionable.

please stop trolling, the author purchased the disk immediate after the release. multiple disks were purchased from newegg, it is recorded publicly here:

https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/intel-opta...

I quote -

"Just ordered another. Sold by newegg. Limit 1 now."

the write endurance is much better than NAND products in the market. try to compare with Inte's previous generation or the current generation from SAMSUNG.

Get a real life and learn how to grow up, stop spreading completely false info. Internet is not built for you to troll.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com