Two years ago, Intel/Micron introduced us to 3D XPoint memory media at a press event in San Francisco California. The performance claims presented were dazzling, to say the least. Since that day, we've been eagerly waiting to get a real 3D XPoint consumer SSD in our hands. Not a tiny caching module like Optane Memory, but a real retail enthusiast SSD with enough capacity to serve as a legitimate system disk. The wait is finally over. Intel's Optane SSD 900P is now hitting retail channels. We had heard rumors that the 900P would come to market at over $2 per gigabyte. Even at that price, we believed that if the 900P was able to live up to Intel's performance and endurance claims, it would certainly be worth the price of admission. Needless to say, we're pleasantly surprised to see the Optane SSD 900P sporting an MSRP that is less than $1.50 per gigabyte. This is roughly 3x the price of high-end flash-based NVMe SSDs, but in this case, you get what you pay for. Optane 900P SSDs can deliver up to 7x the random read performance of the best flash-based SSDs at QD1, and are rated at about 10x the endurance of their flash-based counterparts. For many of you, that actually makes Optane the better overall value.