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Intel Launches Optane Memory That Makes Standard Hard Drives Perform Like SSDs (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes: Intel has officially launched its Optane Memory line of Solid State Drives today, lifting embargo on performance benchmark results as well. Optane Memory is designed to accelerate the storage subsystem on compatible machines, to improve transfer speeds, and reduce latency. It is among the first products to leverage 3D XPoint memory technology that was co-developed by Intel and Micron, offering many of the same properties as NAND flash memory, but with higher endurance and certain performance characteristics that are similar to DRAM. The SSD can be paired to the boot drive in a system, regardless of the capacity or drive type, though Optane Memory will most commonly be linked to slower hard drives. Optane Memory is used as a high-speed repository, as usage patterns on the hard drive are monitored and the most frequently accessed bits of data are copied from the boot drive to the Optane SSD. Since the SSD is used as a cache, it is not presented to the end-user as a separate volume and works transparently in the background. Paired with an inexpensive SATA hard drive, general system performance is more in line with an NVMe SSD. In benchmark testing, Intel Optane Memory delivers a dramatic lift in overall system performance. Boot times, application load time, file searches, and overall system responsiveness are improved significantly. Setting up Intel Optane Memory is also quick and easy with "set it and forget it" type of solution. Optane Memory modules will hit retail this week in 16GB and 32GB capacities, at $44 and $77, respectively.
This isn't news, it's an advertising for Intel.
There are already many ways to do this without using Intels expensive SSDs.
For instance get an SSHD which basically does the same thing in hardware.
Or use ZFS with the relevant ssd arc cache setup
Or use one of many windows programs that do the same thing
Or use the 10$ SSD/HD cards that are out there that do the same thing
Or use a couple of the linux filesystem modules, that aren't as difficult as ZFS, that do the same thing
Don't see why Intel get a headline for something that's been out for years in many different forms, to suit many different operating environments.
Take a look at the ATTO Disk Benchmark graphs and you'll notice that optane comes in at dead last on both read and write performance. Sure, it'll beat Intel's SSD for the first few milliseconds but it gets absolutely destroyed by all the Samsung SSDs. Though, for all we know, the memory controller made the system retarded. Either way, it's not a winner.
The upside of this is that I learned the Samsung SSD 960 Pro M.2 has excellent performance characteristics.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
32 GB of Optane for $77 is $2.40 per GB, Samsung 850 Pro 1 TB is $0.50 per GB. Intel is nearly 5x more expensive.
Hybrid storage systems are common in the enterprise SAN market, but generally to be useful they need something like 20% of capacity to be flash. At ratios of 1-3% of HDD capacity, I don't see the Intel use case as being especially useful.
I had a Seagate 2.5" years ago that was 32 GB flash plus 512GB and it only felt marginally faster than a standard disk drive. You didn't notice serious performance boosts until you went completely flash.
So does Intel have a yield problem or are they still ramping up production facilities to make these in quantity? It's hard to see a system more convoluted than straight SATA or NVMe flash disk being that big of a deal. I think in order to make this product competitive it has to be offered at $/GB competitive with ordinary flash disks or only a small premium.
Given how bad this article's headline is for a tech crowd, if /. didn't get paid to post the story as-is, it really should have. Missed revenue, fellas.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
It seems fairly limited to me. Only Intel CPUs, only Windows 10, special drivers needed.
I was hoping for something with a SATA connector on each end.
Connect one end to the motherboard. Connect the other end to a hard drive. Power on. See a speedup.
*THAT* would have sold millions. This? Not so much.
No sig today...
The point everyone is making is that the new technology has to be competitive somehow, either price, performance, capacity, something, but this one is pretty much pointless, it is more expensive, has greater performance but not really impactfull (my spreadsheet now opens in 0.003s with Xpoint instead of 0.005s with flash SSD, yey!?), for now capacity is very limited and endurance is a far cry from the promised during the first announcements, in the order of 30 fold less.
The strong criticism is about a pointless product sold as great with a technology that should be a big leap forward that is not that much better.