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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 $77, respectively.
Or to the non-buzzword community "use".
Yup, this is no different to "fusion drives" that have been on the market for years - a small SSD acting as a cache for a large spinning disk.
What is different is that all Kaby Lake Intel chipsets come with support for setting this up in the bios, easily and quickly, so long as you are using an Optane PCIe stick as the cache device.
Once the DIMM packaged versions become available, thats when Optane will really start to take off - slightly slower than DRAM, but not much, but considerably cheaper than DRAM for the same capacity - so you get slightly slower, much much cheaper RAM, meaning large RAM setups (like 1TB plus) are no longer out of many peoples budgets...
This isn't news, it's an advertising for Intel.
There are already many ways to do this without using Intels expensive SSDs.
For instance get an SSHD which basically does the same thing in hardware.
Or use ZFS with the relevant ssd arc cache setup
Or use one of many windows programs that do the same thing
Or use the 10$ 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.
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.
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 $/GB competitive with ordinary flash disks or only a small premium.
Given how bad this article's headline is for a tech crowd, if /. didn't get paid to post the story as-is, it really should have. Missed revenue, fellas.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(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...
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.
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.
Let me disable your CPU cache and see if you think it was useful or not. After all, a few megabytes of RAM can't cache all the gigabytes in the system, can it? It will be very limited, only a few limited applications will benefit.
No sig today...
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...
Nobody would've bought /. if they didn't think they had a plan to monetize it more effectively than the last bunch. Conclusion: more aggressive shilling for industry; less competent at hiding it.
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.