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Optane in consumer devices is in a weird place. Write durability does not matter, SSD manufacturers reduce rewrite count with every new generation in the name o

Optane in consumer devices is in a weird place. Write durability does not matter, SSD manufacturers reduce rewrite count with every new generation in the name of the cheaper prices and users are happy to accept that downgrade (see Samsung 980 Pro vs Samsung 970 Pro for a recent occasion). Speed matters to some extent. Many users don't observe performance improvements in their typical tasks when upgrading from SATA SSD to M.2 PCI-E SSD, so they definitely wouldn't notice speed improvement upgrading from M.2 to Optane. And yet Optane's cost is not cheap. I just don't see place for Optane in any user devices. It's either servers, but it's not obvious choice there or tiny market for benchmark users. May be someone like Apple with its vertical integration could exploit it extreme speed to achieve something awesome, but I doubt it, they don't like to depend on a single supplier.

imtringued 6y ago
>Optane in consumer devices is in a weird place. Write durability does not matter, SSD manufacturers reduce rewrite count with every new generation in the name of the cheaper prices and users are happy to accept that downgrade (see Samsung 980 Pro vs Samsung 970 Pro for a recent occasion). The odd thing about rewrite count is that it shrinks very quickly the bigger your drive is. In the past you used to have a 128GB boot SSD and install a few games on it. This meant that you constantly deleted and reinstalled games on that low capacity SSD increasing the rewrite count. Nowadays you can get 500GB SSDs for a decent price. If you can install every game then you might never have to rewrite data on it through uninstallation/installation. A lot of files are only written once and then never changed. With greater capacity you can have more "write once" files.
- rasz 6y ago
  You the consumer might not feel the need to rewrite, but the drive itself has to do this periodically as a matter of internal Flash maintenance. Even Read Disturb (think ram RowHammer) is a thing for NAND. Then you have MLC/TLC technology in conjunction with modern small geometries leading to faster leakage (data persistence) and you end up with failures like Samsung 840 slowing down to a crawl, or older driver forgetting all data after being unplugged for a while, leading to Samsung 840 firmware update forcing the drive to rewrite itself periodically in the background. https://www.techspot.com/news/60362-samsung-fix-slow-840-evo-ssds-periodic-refresh.html https://www.techspot.com/news/60362-samsung-fix-slow-840-evo...

imtringued 6y ago

>Optane in consumer devices is in a weird place. Write durability does not matter, SSD manufacturers reduce rewrite count with every new generation in the name of the cheaper prices and users are happy to accept that downgrade (see Samsung 980 Pro vs Samsung 970 Pro for a recent occasion). The odd thing about rewrite count is that it shrinks very quickly the bigger your drive is. In the past you used to have a 128GB boot SSD and install a few games on it. This meant that you constantly deleted and reinstalled games on that low capacity SSD increasing the rewrite count. Nowadays you can get 500GB SSDs for a decent price. If you can install every game then you might never have to rewrite data on it through uninstallation/installation. A lot of files are only written once and then never changed. With greater capacity you can have more "write once" files.

rasz 6y ago
You the consumer might not feel the need to rewrite, but the drive itself has to do this periodically as a matter of internal Flash maintenance. Even Read Disturb (think ram RowHammer) is a thing for NAND. Then you have MLC/TLC technology in conjunction with modern small geometries leading to faster leakage (data persistence) and you end up with failures like Samsung 840 slowing down to a crawl, or older driver forgetting all data after being unplugged for a while, leading to Samsung 840 firmware update forcing the drive to rewrite itself periodically in the background. https://www.techspot.com/news/60362-samsung-fix-slow-840-evo-ssds-periodic-refresh.html https://www.techspot.com/news/60362-samsung-fix-slow-840-evo...