Intel Optane SSD 905P 960GB Drive Review

Intel Optane SSD 905P Power Consumption

The last area we wanted to test is power consumption and for that we have teamed up with our friends at Quarch Technology over in the UK! Legit Reviews uses the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module in-house for testing all SSDs (SAS, SATA and PCIe). This is a fully programmable power supply and measurement tool comes with power injection fixtures that stop power delivery from system, so all power comes from the power module and can be accurately recorded. Each rail can be programmed from 0 to 120% of its nominal voltage and all sorts of advanced power testing can be done.

We used IOMeter to run a 128KB 100% sequential read/write on the drive at a Queue Depth of 2 and recorded the highest power draw recorded. At idle we let the drive idle for 15 minutes and then recorded the average power consumption. We captured data at 64uS / 15.63KHz over a period of 44 seconds during the start of each power test.

The Intel Optane SSD 905P 960GB drive used roughly 5.8 Watts of power at idle and then power jumped up to 13.4 Watts during the read test and 17.5 Watts during the write portion of power testing. These are high power numbers for an SSD and the reason that you don’t see an M.2 version of this drive series as you don’t want someone sticking one of these into a laptop.

It should also be pointed out that we tried to enable PCI Express Active State Power Management (ASPM) on our desktop board and in Windows 10. Enabling ASPM allows a PCIe link to be slowed down to save power when not being used. Sadly, this feature is not supported on the Intel Optane SSD 905P series.

Let’s wrap up this review!