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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 $77, respectively.
Hybrid drive stuff has been around a while. It works OK up to a very limited point, then it performs like a regular drive. No voodoo magic is going to cache an entire multi-terabyte drive on a tiny expensive SSD. You might boot your OS quicker and have some limited applications perform well but it is strictly limited.
The benefit this provides over the existing hybrid drives, where the flash is in the drive, is the cache is larger and faster, however still tiny compared to a standard modern big hard disk.
Or to the non-buzzword community "use".
Who cares?
Newsflash, expensive high speed non volatile memory is always best used as a cache till the price comes down. News from 1960.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Yup, this is no different to "fusion drives" that have been on the market for years - a small SSD acting as a cache for a large spinning disk.
What is different is that all Kaby Lake Intel chipsets come with support for setting this up in the bios, easily and quickly, so long as you are using an Optane PCIe stick as the cache device.
Once the DIMM packaged versions become available, thats when Optane will really start to take off - slightly slower than DRAM, but not much, but considerably cheaper than DRAM for the same capacity - so you get slightly slower, much much cheaper RAM, meaning large RAM setups (like 1TB plus) are no longer out of many peoples budgets...
This isn't news, it's an advertising for Intel.
There are already many ways to do this without using Intels expensive SSDs.
For instance get an SSHD which basically does the same thing in hardware.
Or use ZFS with the relevant ssd arc cache setup
Or use one of many windows programs that do the same thing
Or use the 10$ 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.
nobody bought it.
Given that it hasn't been launched until now, that went without saying.
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.
Hanging out for a variant that moves from the HD to the SSD to avoid virus scans, and back. I'm not really hanging out for it, but I expect it, because if it's even remotely possible, some twit will do it.
Perhaps should mention that this overpriced, not-that-impressive cache solution is only compatible with the very latest Kaby Lake systems.
So unless you replaced your PC in the past couple of months, this product is not compatible. Not that I'd recommend anyone to touch it with a ten foot pole anyway, with perhaps an exception for very specific professional applications.
But now we see it is not all that, latency is really good but the endurance is barely over flash, so bad that for enterprise product they had to actually use several times the apparent capacity, otherwise it would die really fast due to wear, and for the general consumer the only product they could come up with was an expensive hard drive accelerator, which sincerely, nobody in their right mind should buy, there are already hybrid HD out there with integrated flash that do the same and do not depend on the motherboard chipset/BIOS to operate, and if you are cheap enough to not by a small (and yet much bigger) SSD for your OS for almost the same price, you are not going to buy this.
Hope they some day can live up to the initial hype, but this is not looking to good.
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.
What's the difference between this and the Fusion Drive Apple's been shipping for, like, 5 or 6 years?
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.
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you can get real PCI-E SSD for about $1/gig or less and you don't have to deal with any of the fake raid bs.
Non "standard" memory won't make me switch from my SSD back to a mechanical one. I'm not into speed like I was in the late 80's through late 90's. With the SSD, photoshop boots in about 10 seconds, fast enough for me.
*THAT* not happening...... Ever.... You will always be limited to the speed you can read/write to the storage media on any sustained activity. You can get short term gains by using a cache scheme, but eventually you will overwrite the cache size or read something that's not in cache.... Besides, it's cheaper and faster to just use system RAM as file system cache.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Worse... It's just a cache....
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I think Intel either has a yield problem, or simply that X-Point is a lot more expensive to manufacture than they pretend. NAND and DRAM have very mature manufacturing processes that are hard to beat in cost.
I think in fact that it costs a lot more than $77 to manufacture, that's why they enforce all these artificial restrictions (only Kaby lake only 200 series motherboards) - because they are selling below cost and don't want to hurt their margins too much.
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.
It's also limited to 200 series Intel chipsets (i.e. Kaby Lake) or newer and only on the i3, i5, and i7 (not the lower end variants).
https://arstechnica.com/gadget...
Now that 3D-xpoint is finally available, does anyone have hard numbers for it's read life (how many times it can be read) and/or shelf life (how long it will last without being turned on)?
This is just like those bite-sized freebies in your local grocery store. By themselves, for practical use these drives make little practical sense. Review sites shouldn't have bothered with that Intel's cache bullshit. Instead just treat them as teeny tiny SSD drives serving as a technology preview.
Bottom line - latency on these things is awesome. Write granularity is good too - will be awesome with proper abstraction level in OS. Write endurance - we don't know - waiting for somebody to write the shit out of them.
We'll see if Intel/Micron can get a market foothold (being sandwiched between DRAM and flash SSDs is no picnic).
The machine that I have which needs a storage speed boost the most doesn't even HAVE an M.2 interface!
The second is that one of the big bottlenecks for modern filesystems is the wait until data is safely in persistent storage. System RAM doesn't help here, because it goes away with power failure. To ensure consistency, you have to pause writing parts of an update until you've received confirmation that the previous part is written. In a conventional journaled FS, for example, you don't start writing the updates until you've confirmed that the journal has been committed to disk. With NV cache, you can get this confirmation practically instantly. If there's a power failure, then the drive just has to replay the transactions from NVRAM.
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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.
God, marketers are a plague. It's a cache, just call it that.
Your usage patterns may not exhaust your cache, but I assure you, sustained read and write activity will eventually. I did qualify my statements when I used the word "sustained", so sure, you may get performance improvements for a short time, but eventually this will cost you in sustained transfer reductions.
As you point out, writing may be a bit faster, but this will do NOTHING for random reads. It will do nothing for sustained throughput. But this is true for any kind of cache scheme...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Worse it only supports the recent Intel series chipsets and Kaby Lake CPUs. So basically brand new systems which probably already have SSDs in them anyway.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
Unless there is a pretty good reason to still use a HDD, why not just get an SSD? Would take up less space than a HDD and one of these things.
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Maybe for latency, but an SSD on a SATA III port has 6Gbps of bandwidth to play with. I'm too cheap for an SSD with 750MB/s+ transfer speeds.
Because you need chipset support, not just CPU support.
I just wanted to remind everyone that hybrid drives with flash memory mini-SSDs have always been inconsistent, overpriced, underperforming crap ever since they were invented. My company has tested dozens of them and they're all completely unpredictable. Also a 16GB buffer? Great, my game's sound and data files are 19GB. It's just not practical and the firmware isn't nearly smart enough nor are they big enough. A 64GB one could just barely get by on loading common operating instructions but that's not how big any of them are.
> are SANs that are designed for backups
High speed cache is good for data that is accessed, then accessed again a few seconds later. Web servers are a good example - the same page may be loaded many thousands of times per hour, or even thousands of times per minute.
For backup, each sector of data is accessed no more than about once per day. In my experience, backup is where you want sustained throughout, caching doesn't help. We use wide arrays.
you can get real PCI-E SSD for about $1/gig or less and you don't have to deal with any of the fake raid bs.
How do you define "real PCI-E SSD"? Would you include a $9,000 enterprise-grade PCI-E SSD from Intel with up to 850,000 IOPS 4K random reads?
Intel DC P3608
Guess what? It consists of two SSD's that are configured as RAID0 by Intel's RSTe driver software.
You have this now with hybrid or fusion (as Apple calls them) drives. They put a small SSD in front of the traditional hard drive and it looks the same to the computer. I have one in my iMac and it's not as fast as an SSD but it's definitely faster than just a plain HDD.
When I was looking at drives for my Synology NAS there were people that were putting the hybrid drives in there without issues. I didn't go with them because I spent my money on capacity versus the speed but if I could have afforded to I would have put them in.
I just hope that they don't get the hard drive manufacturers on board. I don't want to have to worry about looking out for Windows/Intel only hard drives the next time I go shopping for one.
but if you buy the premise that, you have a brand new system with a new chipset and cpu but for some reason decided on older spinning disks without built in cache (because you like your 1990's drive) then it all makes sense.
Sequential operations on an SSD can max out a SATA port, but random won't. Random I/O in also where SSDs beat HDDs, and offer a massive performance boost (why for example boot times are so quick), but until the drive manufacturers max out Random I/O, SATA isn't the limit.
It looks to me like Intel/Micron wants to get their new product in the hands of early adopters first instead of trying to appeal to the mass market off the bat. This technology is radically different than what we are used to. They are looking for people who see the vision of what they are trying to accomplish and are willing to throw time, effort, and money at moving that technology forward. People who buy this first product are not the ones who think 'I am only interested if this is much better, cheaper, and faster than what I am now using!' but rather 'How can I help prove this technology by putting it through the paces because I like where this can lead to?' That is the mentality of an early adopter as opposed to the masses.
Could you go in to more detail regarding the "10$ SSD/HD cards" and "couple of linux filesystem modules"?
They sound very interesting?
"Traditional" NAND flash was much more expensive than spinning rust but came in sizes useful at least for boot disk applications *and* delivered overwhelmingly better performance from the same bus/connection as spinning rust.
IMHO, Intel can't pimp this out as faster than NAND flash for more money. Like CPUs, flash storage has more or less hit the speed levels where more speed simply isn't that useful outside of very narrow use cases.
The angle they needed to work was density and write endurance. There's still a fair use case for spinning rust at certain scales, driven mostly by slot limits in server and storage chassis. If you want 40 TB but only have 10 slots, you have to use spinning rust. Providing a solid state disk at this density with superior write endurance would really be a market disruption.
So pair a $55 2Tb HDD with $77 32GB Optane drive = effectively a $132 2Tb HDD w/ near SSD access speeds?
SSD street prices for 1TB SSDs are about $300.
Sounds like a deal to me.
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It seems fairly limited to me. Only Intel CPUs, only Windows 10, special drivers needed.
And only worth the money, I presume, if you have a HDD. If you're building a new system, which is highly likely given all the required specs, it seems unlikely that you would spec one. I'd much sooner get a slow-by-SSD-standards SSD.
If only they had developed a product which would somehow work with any system with a M.2 slot (which by extension could be slapped into PCI-E) then it would seem there would be a lot more potential takers.
Maybe Intel developed this product in response to a specific customer's demand, and commercialized it in an attempt to recoup R&D costs?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"