Each NAND chip on an SSD is actually relatively slow. To get high read and write speeds, the access is multiplexed across all of the chips in the drive. Small c

Each NAND chip on an SSD is actually relatively slow. To get high read and write speeds, the access is multiplexed across all of the chips in the drive. Small capacity drives have a smaller number of NAND chips. This reduces the performance of the drives. In addition each NAND cell has a very limited number of lifetime writes it supports, typically 1k to 4k erase/write cycles. So drives do wear leveling, spreading writes over the whole drive. Therefore drives uses in extremely right heavy enterprise workloads may need to be very large just to support the required write endurance. From what I understand Optane is fast enough to not need this extra controller processing. Resulting in the incrediblly latency performance demonstrated by Optabe drives. I suspect if Intel wanted to sacrifice latency, they could dramatically increase top line read and write performance by performing the same read and write interleaving that NAND SSDs do.