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Optane SSDs are really special and still have a place. SLC is 30 microseconds at best, FIO puts my 905p optane drive at 5-11 microseconds. That means for a single threaded latency bound task, a 905p may finish it 6 times faster than an SLC ssd. 20 times faster than MLC!

Edit - wrong prefix sorry!

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Maybe your fio is hitting RAM? fio for 905p / p5800x is usually low micros. Order of magnitude faster than other nvme but not as fast as RAM.

Even hitting RAM takes the best part of 100ns. They probably mean 5-10us given the ‘6x faster’ thing.

50ns is typical with overclocked desktop RAM

do you have your fio benchmark / args handy? i would love to get sub-micro out of optane, even if it's only on paper

it's possible to get <1us with Optane PMem (the dimms) in fio, you just need to use the memory-specific engines so that it avoids the fs/block layer.

I use an Optane drive for boot/pagefile and for my VR simulators (two drives) for exactly this reason. It doesn't help peak FPS, but it has a noticeable effect on the 1% and 0.1% cases, to the point where I notice it and can tune around the difference.

This is a 905p vs SK Hynix Platinum for reference.

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