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The Optane details seem like a false start, at least for consumers. It may have use in enterprise just due to the endurance for WALs and ZIL etc. Performance
by kev009 10y ago
The Optane details seem like a false start, at least for consumers. It may have use in enterprise just due to the endurance for WALs and ZIL etc.
Performance of the NVMe Samsung 960 Pro is to the point where enterprise HHHL cards were not much more than a year ago. These are affordable for mid-high end notebooks, and the 960 Evo delivers close to the same amount of performance for an actual consumer workload not running benchmarks that will easily hit the rest of the mid range and down into low end at lower capacity.
According to Micron, there isn't much demand for large consumer SSDs. 1TB will be held for a while as the sweet spot.
So, where do you need 16GB of cache but for HDDs? And where is an HDD actually useful in a modern notebook? I can see people wanting a few TB in a portable USB enclosure. But as a boot/OS drive, you really want all flash.
- eloff 10y agoI'd rather a big, fast SSD than an Optane+HDD combo. An HDD in a laptop is just yuck. But Optane does seem to out-perform the top-end PCIe enterprise SSDs by a factor of 5-7x, at least judging by the benchmarks Intel has published against it's own top-end SSDs.
- dogma1138 10y agoIt seems like they are putting those drives on x2 PCIE slots there is no way it's going to outpace any NVME drive. Their capacity is also very small this looks to me like 2005 when Lenovo had SSD cache addin cards for the pc/express card slots. Give me a 2tb drive or go him until the the 960/960 pro is all the rage.
- petra 10y agoWell: the industry estimates that SSD for consumer laptops will have a marketshare of ~50% in 201-7-2018. HDD are $45/TB while SSD at $170/TB(17 cents/GB). if we assume optane is 10x more expensive than SSD , it's at $1.7/GB or $27/16GB. So we're comparing HDD+optane at ~$72 with a $170 SSD. For the lower end of the market or for people who want large capacity , this seems attractive. Also if the performance is nice enough, it might change the buying decision for some people - why settle for 1TB ?
- brudgers 10y agoMost Intel technologies are not for consumers initially. Eventually, consumers may wind up with a product that incorporates the technology after a while. For example, the laptops in the Lenovo announcement that triggered the Anand piece are all in the SMB to Enterprise segment. A person can't walk into BestBuy and walk out with a ThinkPad T4xx. So I agree that to a first approximation, the critical factor in the consumer space is how well the browser performs. Hitting the hard disk doesn't matter and that's why smartphones and tablets can ship with 16 or 32GB of total mass storage. What this will might eventually do in the consumer space is to allow competition on total storage size in a way that's cost effective for manufacturers, even a 256GB SSD is a significant fraction of a $350-$500 typical consumer laptop.
- benjaminl 10y agoI think that you misunderstand the usage of the Optane, it isn't meant to be a cache for an HDD. It will serve as a cache for the NVMe SSD. In hardware terms even an NVMe SSD's random access is slow compared to DRAM memory. From the article: Intel's SRT already has caching algorithms tuned for 16GB to 64GB caches in front of hard drives, so now that they have a solution for mediating access to NVMe SSDs it is simple to enable using both features simultaneously. The changes do need to be added to both the RST driver and to the motherboard firmware if booting from a cached volume is to be supported. Backporting and deploying the firmware changes to Skylake motherboards should be possible but is unlikely to happen.