Intel Optane H10 Vs Samsung 970EVO

Intel announced an Optane H10 Hybrid SSD at CES last week. How might it compare to Samsung 970EVO on cost and performance?










Intel announced a Optane H10 M.2 SSD which will be in laptops sometime in Q2 or Q3. It combines Intel optane memory (the 16G or 32G cache for HDD) and a Intel QLC SSD all on one module. Optane/3D XPoint acts as a cache for the QLC SSD. By merging them together, Intel sells both NAND and 3D Xpoint and saves the PC manufacturer a M.2 slot. It is two SSDs on one board managed by Intel RST driver and custom firmware

Performance: we can expect that the Optane will perform like other Optane Memory tests. Lower latency on anything cached, slow down to SSD (QLC in this case) performance on huge serial transfers. This alone will make it a high performance SSD. Most likely faster than 970EVO on QD1 latency and speed, slightly slower than 970 on large file transfers or un-cached as QLC is slower than TLC in most applications. Power is unknown but historically, Optane is a power hungry technology

Cost is the key as always: Our data indicates H10 cost is slightly higher than 970EVO at 500GB, slightly lower than 970EVO at 1TB. See details below. Since Intel is highly motivated to sell this product to move its built up NAND and 3D XPoint inventory, they can price it aggressively... even at cost. This should make it a competitive product for PC OEMs. Not HDD cheap, and not as cheap as Intel's pure QLC NVMe SSD but a less expensive SSD with high NVMe performance.

It should be a solid competitor to 970EVO for the highest performance notebook storage.

H10 Review
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-optane-h10-qlc-ssd,38387.html

Optane Memory Review
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-optane-3d-xpoint-memory,5032.html

970EVO Review
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/samsung-970-evo-ssd-review,5573.html

We have costs for all SSDs, NAND, and new NVM technologies along with performance numbers for Optane/3d XPoint

Mark Webb
www.mkwventures.com