With Optane Memory, Intel Claims To Make Hard Drives Faster Than SSDs (pcworld.com)

SSDs are generally faster than hard drives. However, they are also usually more expensive. Intel wants to change that with its new Optane Memory lineup, which it claims is faster and better performing than SSDs while not requiring customers to break their banks. From a report on PCWorld: Announced Monday morning, these first consumer Optane-based devices will be available April 24 in two M.2 trims: A 16GB model for $44 and a 32GB Optane Memory device for $77. Both are rated for crazy-fast read speeds of 1.2GBps and writes of 280MBps. [...] When the price of a 128GB SATA SSD is roughly $50 to $60 today, you may rightly wonder why Optane Memory would be worth the bother. Intel says most consumers just don't want to give up the capacity for their photos and videos. PC configurations with a hard drive and an SSD, while standard for higher-end PC users, isn't popular for the newbies. Think of the times you've had friends or family fill up the boot drive with cat pictures, but the secondary drive is nearly empty. Intel Optane Memory would give that mainstream user the same or better performance as an SSD, with the capacity advantage of the 1TB or 2TB drive they're used to. Intel claims Optane Memory performance is as good or better than an SSD's, offering better latency by magnitudes and the ability to peak at much lower queue depths.

Comments

Intel Marketing Incorrect

[foxalopex]

The way Intel plans on using Optane memory, yes it will most certainly improve the speed of HDs by caching but to say it will always outperform an SSD is an outright lie. For starters if you're working with unusually large datasets it likely won't all fit in Optane memory and unless your cache is highly intelligent and can read ahead, it's likely that things will load slowly on the first attempt. Then for laptops there's also the bonus of not destroying the HD if your laptop gets bumped in the wrong way or treated with a bit of abuse when operating. If this worked so well then Seagate's hybrid SSD / HD drives should be almost everything but it isn't.

Terrible article summary

[jlv]

Intel is marketing the Optane Memory M.2 modules as caches for hard drives.

"Lather, rinse, repeat. With each duplicate task, the launching speed accelerated. The load time for Gimp, for example, dropped from about 14 seconds to 8 seconds, and then to 3 or 4 seconds as the Optane Memory cached the task."

That's only speeding up accesses for repeated tasks (which, granted, there are many of).

I think the problem Intel found is that Optane memory is too expensive right now in larger sizes. They came up with this cache module as their best way to market it. Is someone really going to spent $77 for a 32GB cache device when they can just spend $99 for a 256GB SSD?

Re:Terrible article summary

[Erioll]

Actually if I were building another PC soon, I'd do exactly that. Get a 2TB drive cheap ($50-60) and then this for $77. Cheaper than a $99 SSD and the same hard drive, and I don't need to worry about getting a "very large" %APPDATA% directory or have to do configuration of my media, which (large) games are on my SSD versus not, etc. I'm willing to do that now, but I'd be glad to not have to worry about all of that. Just put it all on "C" and then let the Intel "magic" do its job for what I'm running most frequently.

It's the "just make it simple" approach which is good.

The are cashes FOR hard drives

[Ecuador]

Yeah, it is not clear from the summary, reading it I thought it was about hybrid drives, but the sizes don't make sense.
So, these are M.2 expansion cards which offer a big and very fast cache for your existing hard drive.