3 ms·

Optane is dead. Long live Optane! PCIE 3.0 Optane recently sold so well it got backordered and the price popped. (Ok maybe it was LevelOneTechs Wendell? Mayb

Optane is dead. Long live Optane! PCIE 3.0 Optane recently sold so well it got backordered and the price popped. (Ok maybe it was LevelOneTechs Wendell? Maybe it was organic? https://www.newegg.com/intel-optane-905p-1-5tb/p/N82E16820167505 https://www.newegg.com/intel-optane-905p-1-5tb/p/N82E1682016... ) Today PCIE 4.0 prices have fallen so fast that you can RAID0 a few M.2s and get about the same IOPs from a single Optane drive for a similar $ per GB, though not exactly the same durability / DWPD. Chia is no longer a driving force for drive durability, but then again Optane was designed for databases / SAN and not proof-of-space (e.g. PNY https://www.pny.com/lx3030-m2-nvme-ssd https://www.pny.com/lx3030-m2-nvme-ssd ). Optane as a consumer product might have been a good play when laptops mostly had spinning disks, but market timing was too late. Today those consumer Optane drives were, yeah, a mistake, but a cool part for a homelab. Optane as an enterprise / workstation product though is king for: * databases / ml datasets that don't fit in memory * large SANs that host critical VM persistent storage It's a small niche but when IOPS and durability matter, there's nothing close. However if Optane really ends at PCIE 4.0, then top-tier PCIE 5.0 nvme will probably meet or beat Optane in 2024.

DeathArrow 3y ago
Well, if Optane wasn't dead, it would not be stalling. If SSD speeds would be improving, so would Optane speeds.
Havoc 3y ago
I’ve been using them on SBCs for that reason - on pcie 3 you still get the latency benefits even if throughput isn’t there.
mdip 3y ago
It's possible the price pop is happening because of people trying to find spare parts. I can't speak to these specific devices because I haven't been doing infrastructure work since before 2015, but I recall the price of certain enterprise products would routinely skyrocket a few years after it became hard to find them. I recall having to source a replacement drive for a server at my Dad's company and discovering that finding any drive at least 4.5GB in capacity for this 15 year old server was challenging. I ended up having to buy a much larger drive at about twice the cost of a modern (at the time) enterprise-grade SAS drive. I doubt my specific example is all that similar to what might be happening. In my case, it was a confluence of the usual suspects: RAID controllers that are very particular about the specific drive models/firmware versions that they work reliably with (which everyone else needs to replace their drives, too!) coupled with the server using a no-longer-common interface (SCA) and a drive tray specific to the vendor which was no longer a popular (and went Bankrupt)[0]. I suspect it's too soon for it to be that simple but I wonder if there are specific circumstances where "My Optane drive failed and replacing this drive at any cost is the only fix that gets me access to my data, again". [0] Not important, but it was a Gateway brand server if you can believe it. And I ended up kludging the tray situation, anyway.

DeathArrow 3y ago

Well, if Optane wasn't dead, it would not be stalling. If SSD speeds would be improving, so would Optane speeds.

Havoc 3y ago

I’ve been using them on SBCs for that reason - on pcie 3 you still get the latency benefits even if throughput isn’t there.

mdip 3y ago

It's possible the price pop is happening because of people trying to find spare parts. I can't speak to these specific devices because I haven't been doing infrastructure work since before 2015, but I recall the price of certain enterprise products would routinely skyrocket a few years after it became hard to find them. I recall having to source a replacement drive for a server at my Dad's company and discovering that finding any drive at least 4.5GB in capacity for this 15 year old server was challenging. I ended up having to buy a much larger drive at about twice the cost of a modern (at the time) enterprise-grade SAS drive. I doubt my specific example is all that similar to what might be happening. In my case, it was a confluence of the usual suspects: RAID controllers that are very particular about the specific drive models/firmware versions that they work reliably with (which everyone else needs to replace their drives, too!) coupled with the server using a no-longer-common interface (SCA) and a drive tray specific to the vendor which was no longer a popular (and went Bankrupt)[0]. I suspect it's too soon for it to be that simple but I wonder if there are specific circumstances where "My Optane drive failed and replacing this drive at any cost is the only fix that gets me access to my data, again". [0] Not important, but it was a Gateway brand server if you can believe it. And I ended up kludging the tray situation, anyway.