And only 5 times the price for “snappy” back when consumer Optane existed! And now 20 times the price for an enterprise drive as the only option.

Oh none of these was actually near “full”, other than being partitioned (though I leave about 10% unpartitioned). I wanted a larger drive so I could consolidate the two I was using without having to shrink them, as sometimes I DO end up temporarily using a lot more space, so I could stick another larger drive in the second slot for another use. But it would only benchmark worse if it were so full that the pseudo-SLC cache available was reduced to the point that the benchmark run used it up, and then would get even worse if the benchmarks were writing enough data to use up unallocated blocks and prevent garbage collection before the next run, so that the NAND needed to perform the erase cycles during the tests. I’ve only actually got 354GB of data used out of the 932GB real space on the drive.

Interestingly, my first pass test this morning was actually worse than it was last night on the P41, however I had not forced TRIM to run and it was only about 5 hours of idle time in Windows. And I realized that BOTH runs in ATTO were actually slightly slower than the Inland (microcenter brand) PCIe3 drive in the secondary M.2 slot, at least up to the point that the PCIe3 bandwidth became a limitation.

I’ve got time to let things settle and do more testing, and see how the real usage feels, but it’s really starting to look like in my particular use case the extra cost for this drive may not be justified. Having higher max throughput on the occasional times that I’m writing a really large amount of very large files is nice, but I’m not sure it’s “twice the price” nice or that it happens often enough. In the past, I did a lot more stuff that could have made it justifiable, and I’ve still got that mindset when I look at parts.

Seeing that the random performance, which is the bulk of usage, is actually WORSE than even a cheap drive or my old main drive, is quite disappointing. I just hadn’t really considered the possibility that such an old drive could have been so far ahead of the pack back then that it remains a good choice today.