News Intel announces Optane modules for desktops

According to other sources (LTT), you're talking starting at $50 which isn't too bad. After all it's not a solution for the high end as it's designed to boost slower SATA based storage and is likely to offer little/no benefit if you have a bleeding edge PCIe solution.

 

They're not for the likes of us though. NVMe drives may be getting cheaper, but compare the price of a 1TB model to spinner plus one of these and they're not exactly cheap.

Happy to see it landing in a consumer product. I'm looking forward to when they can finally scale it up to primary storage levels - can't be long I shouldn't imagine. If you consider the speed from a measly 16GB, very exciting indeed.

 

I can't think of an SSD with a random read/write at a queue depth of 1 that reaches 70k/300k, even a Samsung 960 PRO M.2 only manages 14k/50k at QD1.

 

Buy more RAM and use that for caching, ROG Ramcache, Samsung Rapid Mode and so on exist after all.

 

Not sure where you're getting those numbers from as Samsung's own site says read/write iOPS is 10k/40k @4kb, QD1 for the 850 Evo 1TB, and the specs on their site says the M.2 NVME SSD 960 Evo 1TB achieves a read/write iOPS of 14k/50k @4kb, QD1.

I'm going to guess you're quoting 32QD iOPS, if so that's largely irrelevant as an OS and other software hardly ever gets close to sending so many read/write requests that they need to be queued, you'd have to be sending more than 14k/50k read/write requests (in the case of the M.2 NVME SSD 960 Evo 1TB) per second to start using more than a single queue.

 

Aren't you the guy that historically has always been saying that drives are too big, and people should stop keeping so much stuff?

Anyway, your comment beginning "10 times more expensive, but..." means this isn't for you. Why do we even need spinning disks any more when you will be able to actually order a 32TB SSD imminently. I mean, it's only 50 times more expensive, but...

Having not looked into the technical minutia of it, I would hope that it's doing something more intelligent than file level caching - the working set (i.e. the hot data) of a single user workload is going to be tiny at a block level for even power-users with 1TB of data - well within 32GB. Even at a file level, it's still plenty, it's just a less efficient way of doing it.

You already have a RAM cache in your machine, It's called RAM. Thinking you're more intelligent than your OS at managing RAM residency and just ramming (har har) everything in there via a RAMdisk is a bit silly.

It kind of misses the whole point of non-volatile.

3D XPoint has the potential to be a serious game-changer for primary storage in the very near future, don't dismiss it because it doesn't precisely fit what you want from it today.

Or do. I don't really care

 

Great potential, after 2 - 3 more generations when it will be significantly faster and bigger than it is right now.

 

1.5TB U.2 drives are on the roadmap for H2... maybe 2-3 generations to hit a consumer price point though!

 

Massive IOPS performance compared to even top-end SSDs is interesting, but I'll be waiting to see what actual performance benefits it brings in practice in common tasks before switching to a motherboard with more than one m.2 slot. The practical benefits of an SSD cache + spinning-rust drive were never phenomenal under everyday use.

 

Like i said a 32QD is a pointless metric, well unless you're into massive databases or some other software that makes millions of different requests for data per second, most data requested from storage is sequential.

Intel's being a bit misleading by using QD4, understandably their doing that because it shows Optane in its best light, however it also shows that Optane reaches it's maximum iOPS much quicker than other storage mediums (excluding RAM).


Sauce.

 

I do think the traditional RAM-storage distinction is going to get blurry quicker than a lot of people think.

 

Due to the current micro size of it I agree, but I'd guess sometime late 2018 or early 2019 they'll have affordable ones big enough to obsolete the traditional nvme m.2 ssds as an OS drive.

 

Why would they obelete nvme m.2's? You think they are just going to sit there and not develop as well? They too will increase in speeds and capacities.

 

Last couple words of my post "as an OS drive" doesn't mean as everything.

 

I don't believe we will have to wait long for Optane drives like that to be affordable.

With game sizes constantly going up even sata ssds (unless of course you are willing to blow infinite money) are struggling to hold more than a handful.

 

We used to think the 100-200 iOPS @QD1 was plenty for the average user when we all used HDD, for most people the first thing they notice when changing from HDD to SSD is the extra responsiveness, that's not the extra MB/s they're feeling that's the extra iOPS.

Yes that's also part of it however having a high read/write speed only really helps when reading/writing larger sequential files, outside of games and some multimedia stuff most software is making many small requests for data and if that data isn't stored in RAM it needs to request it from permanent storage.

I wouldn't say that, in fact I'd even consider adding one to a SSD or even a M.2 NVMe drive.

Saying it's a turd is a bit like saying the L3 cache on a CPU is a turd.

 

I think the argument about size/performance/price ratio is pretty much pointless, because the biggest selling point is ease of use/installation. For the average user buying, then installing a shiny SSD leads to installing Windows again and that is still scary for most people. With XPoint it's literally sticking it into the M.2 slot then forget about it. No need to install Windows or configure anything, it just works and makes starting your applications/games faster. That is the real progress here, if you ask me.

 

Greetings!

Having seen many peoples systems, the answer is usually personal photos and\or porn collection.

 

Yes, because it doesn't make sense to you it must be a psychological condition. And if a product doesn't benefit you personally, it's totally pointless.