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"The theory that this market exists in any significant way never pans out in practice." The transition from HDD to SSD technology is a counter example to your

by mrb 3y ago

"The theory that this market exists in any significant way never pans out in practice." The transition from HDD to SSD technology is a counter example to your claim. It was a drop-in replacement (same SATA interface) and the tech significantly improved performance without any other software modification needed.

anonylizard 3y ago
Didn't SSD's get a start with laptops and mobile devices? There the advantage of being shock resistant is massive and unsolvable with any other solution. For a superior but new tech to stick, it has to find a viable market to be first self-sustaining, only then can it attack larger and more lucrative markets (Back in those days, PC was probably more lucrative than mobile). Only when SSDs matured enough, did they start eating up the entire storage market.
- bravetraveler 3y ago
  I wouldn't really say they started with mobile/laptops They came in 2.5 inch form factor from the very beginning, the laptop shape... which fits pretty much anything. Desktops and servers use it. The packaging was trivial. They were just cost prohibitive for anything more than an operating system drive. This worked out to our benefit, the OS is where random access performance shines It might be fair to say flash used in SSDs started in other applications... but it's important to remember that's also different flash. It wasn't until the flash changed significantly that we got SSDs (durability), changing everything we once knew. Price, applications, etc.
- pantalaimon 3y ago
  With SSDs you really feel the performance difference (especially latency) in everyday life. Someone who had experienced an SSD never wanted to go back to a HDD for storing anything but data, since program start-up times are just so much faster when there is no mechanical seeking involved. The difference between Optane and an SSD was never so striking.
  - keyringlight 3y ago
    At least for consumer devices, I think the 'primordial soup' spark of motivation was the original lean and mean netbooks (with the initial push to web apps over running full clients locally, before they became low spec windows laptops), with compact flash ATA adapters to displace HDDs. Power consumption was a factor as well IIRC
ot 3y ago
SSDs are orders of magnitude faster than HDD, enough to justify the cost differential and investments to rethink the software stack. Octane was an incremental improvement in performance when compared to SSD, and in cost when compared to RAM. An awkward spot to be in.
- afdsganionio 3y ago
  >Octane was an incremental improvement in performance when compared to SSD Optane PM was byte-addressable and had latency of ~300 ns. It rendered the entire block storage abstraction obsolete. It was so radical that using it effectively would require throwing out the assumptions all OSes have made about IO for the past fifty years. The fact that it offered an incremental improvement even when its unique capabilities were completely ignored shows how phenomenally capable the technology was.

by mrb 3y ago

anonylizard 3y ago

Didn't SSD's get a start with laptops and mobile devices? There the advantage of being shock resistant is massive and unsolvable with any other solution. For a superior but new tech to stick, it has to find a viable market to be first self-sustaining, only then can it attack larger and more lucrative markets (Back in those days, PC was probably more lucrative than mobile). Only when SSDs matured enough, did they start eating up the entire storage market.

bravetraveler 3y ago
I wouldn't really say they started with mobile/laptops They came in 2.5 inch form factor from the very beginning, the laptop shape... which fits pretty much anything. Desktops and servers use it. The packaging was trivial. They were just cost prohibitive for anything more than an operating system drive. This worked out to our benefit, the OS is where random access performance shines It might be fair to say flash used in SSDs started in other applications... but it's important to remember that's also different flash. It wasn't until the flash changed significantly that we got SSDs (durability), changing everything we once knew. Price, applications, etc.
pantalaimon 3y ago
With SSDs you really feel the performance difference (especially latency) in everyday life. Someone who had experienced an SSD never wanted to go back to a HDD for storing anything but data, since program start-up times are just so much faster when there is no mechanical seeking involved. The difference between Optane and an SSD was never so striking.
- keyringlight 3y ago
  At least for consumer devices, I think the 'primordial soup' spark of motivation was the original lean and mean netbooks (with the initial push to web apps over running full clients locally, before they became low spec windows laptops), with compact flash ATA adapters to displace HDDs. Power consumption was a factor as well IIRC

ot 3y ago

SSDs are orders of magnitude faster than HDD, enough to justify the cost differential and investments to rethink the software stack. Octane was an incremental improvement in performance when compared to SSD, and in cost when compared to RAM. An awkward spot to be in.

afdsganionio 3y ago
>Octane was an incremental improvement in performance when compared to SSD Optane PM was byte-addressable and had latency of ~300 ns. It rendered the entire block storage abstraction obsolete. It was so radical that using it effectively would require throwing out the assumptions all OSes have made about IO for the past fifty years. The fact that it offered an incremental improvement even when its unique capabilities were completely ignored shows how phenomenally capable the technology was.