Stefan Mileschin

During Intel's keynote at Computex 2018, Intel Client Computing Group manager Gregory Bryant offered a brief preview of the upcoming M.2 version of the Optane SSD 905P high-end NVMe SSD. Intel's Optane SSD lineup has been split between the high-performance, high-power drives in 2.5" U.2 and PCIe add-in card form factors, and the much lower-performance M.2 drives of the Optane Memory and Optane SSD 800P product lines. The existence of a M.2 version of the 905P was leaked before the U.2 and AIC versions of the 905P were officially launched.

At first glance, it would appear that the combination of Intel's high-end Optane SSD controller architecture and the more consumer-friendly M.2 form factor would be a welcome addition to the product family. However, this drive appears to be nearly identical to the enterprise Optane SSD DC P4801X we spotted earlier this year at the Open Compute Project Summit. The only difference we can spot is that the drive shown at Computex appears to have a metal heatspreader over the SSD controller, but the presentation's images of the drive show the bare controller as exhibited at OCP Summit. This means that the M.2 Optane SSD 905P will use the 110mm long M.2 form factor generally used by enterprise M.2 drives, instead of the 80mm length used by almost all consumer M.2 drives. This extra length will prevent the M.2 Optane SSD 905P from being used in most notebook computers (though Intel claims the 905P M.2 will be suitable for mobile use), and will exclude it from many M.2 slots on desktop motherboards. Intel has mentioned using the 905P in quad-M.2 riser cards such as those sold by ASUS and ASRock. Those adapters allow high-end desktops to provide four PCIe lanes to each of four drives by enabling port bifurcation on one of their PCIe x16 slot, allowing for the best possible NVMe RAID performance.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12899...ssd-905p-380gb