The reason there's so much excitement around Intel's Optane-branded 3D Xpoint memory is the combination of performance and endurance. 3D Xpoint offers storage faster than NAND flash memory, with access times comparable to DRAM, and endurance allowing for 10 full drive writes every single day for five years.
HotHardware got its hands on Intel's latest Optane SSD 905P 960GB PCIe drive and put it through its paces. And yes, you should hide your credit card before reading about how fast this drive actually is.
The 905P will be offered in two capacities and form factors. The first (and the one tested) is a 960GB half height half length PCIe add-in card. The second is a 480GB U.2 2.5-inch drive. The drives boast sustained sequential read/write speeds of 2,600MB/s and 2,200MB/s, respectively. Access times are a mere 10 microseconds.
Life expectancy is 1.6 million hours, endurance is 10 drive writes per day, and power use varies between 6W (idle) to 10-14W (average power use during operation) and 16.4W (maximum for burst writes). When installed, the 905P runs completely silently as there are no fans, but it will produce quite a bit of heat so requires good general case ventilation. If you have a window in your case you'll be able to enjoy the blue lights Intel embedded into the drive, too.
Using a test system running an Intel Core i7-8700K with 16GB of RAM, an Nvidia Quadro P4000 graphics card, and Windows 10 Pro x64, HotHardware compared the Optane 905P to several other drives including the Optane 800p and 900p, Samsung's 960 Pro and 970 Pro, a Corsair Force GT, OCZ RD400, and a WD Black NVMe.
The results are, to put it mildly, impressive, with the 905P in some cases offering three times the performance of its rivals. Random read and write performance are the best HotHardware has seen, as is throughput at low queue depths. Access times are best in class. Sequential data transfers aren't the fastest, but nobody is going to complain about reads and writes at over 2GB/s.
Intel knows it has a highly desirable storage solution in its possession, and as you'd expect it isn't going to be cheap. The 960GB 905P costs an eye-watering $1,299, which works out to $1.35 per gigabyte. When you consider the Samsung 970 Pro 1TB can be found for $500, it's hard to justify the price of the 905P unless you have money to burn or somehow find M.2 PCIe drives limiting.