7 ms·

Cost was fantastically cheap, if you take into account that Optane is going to live >>10x longer than a SSD. For a lot of bulk storage, yes, you don't have fre

Cost was fantastically cheap, if you take into account that Optane is going to live >>10x longer than a SSD. For a lot of bulk storage, yes, you don't have frequently changing data. But for databases or caches, that are under heavy load, optane was not only far faster, but if looking at life-cycle costs, way way less.

wtallis 8mo ago
Optane was in the market during a time when the mainstream trend in the SSD industry was all about sacrificing endurance to get higher capacity. It's been several years, and I'm not seeing a lot of regrets from folks who moved to TLC and QLC NAND, and those products are more popular than ever. The niche that could actually make use of Optane's endurance was small and shrinking, and Intel had no roadmap to significantly improve Optane's $/GB which was unquestionably the technology's biggest weakness.
- raron 8mo ago
  > I'm not seeing a lot of regrets from folks who moved to TLC and QLC NAND, and those products are more popular than ever. That's interesting. Even TLC has huge limitations, but QLC is basically useless unless you use it as write-once-read-many memory. I wish I have bought a lot of SSDs when you could still buy MLC ones.
  - wtallis 8mo ago
    > QLC is basically useless unless you use it as write-once-read-many memory The market thoroughly disagrees with your stupid exaggeration. QLC is a high-volume mainstream product. It's popular in low-end consumer SSDs, where the main problem is not endurance but sustained performance (especially writing to a mostly-full drive). A Windows PC is hardly a WORM workload.
    - fc417fc802 8mo ago
      Seems like it is though? Most consumer usage does not have much churn. For things like the browser cache that do churn the total volume isn't that high. The comparison here is database and caching workloads in the datacenter that experience high churn at an extremely high sustained volume. Many such workloads exist.
      - wtallis 8mo ago
        There's a very big difference between a workload where you have to take care to structure your IO to minimize writes so you don't burn out the drive, and a workload that is simply easy enough that you don't have to care about the write endurance because even the crappy drives will last for years.
        fc417fc802 8mo ago
        Of course. The inferior but cheaper technology is more cost effective in most cases but for certain workloads that won't be the case despite being more affordable per unit upfront. The workloads flash is more cost effective for (ie most of them) either aren't all that write heavy or alternatively leave the drive sitting idle the vast majority of the time. The typical consumer usecase is primarily reads while it mostly sits idle, with the relevant performance metrics largely determined by occasional bursts of activity.
      - Dylan16807 8mo ago
        Consumer usage does not have much churn, but the average desktop is probably doing 5-50 drive writes per year. That's far away from a heavy database load, but it's just as far away from WORM.
mapt 8mo ago
Write endurance of the drive would be measured in TBW, and TLC flash kept adding enough 3D layers to stay cheap enough, quickly enough, that Optane never really beat their pricing per TBW to make a practical product. I have to wonder if it isn't usable for some kind of specialized AI workflow that would benefit from extremely low latency reads but which is isn't written often, at this point. Perhaps integrated in a GPU board.
- jauntywundrkind 8mo ago
  The extra capacity of modern SSD is a good point, especially now that we have 100TB+ SSD. But Optane still offered 100 DWPD (drive writes per day), up to 3.2TB. Thats still just so many more DWPD than flash ssd. A Kioxia CM8V for example will do 12TB at 3 DWPD. The net TBW is still 10x apart. You can get back to high endurance with SLC drives like the Solidigm p7-p5810, but you're back down to 1.6TB and 50 DWPD, so, 1/4 the Intel P5800X endurance, and worse latencies. I highly suspect the drive model here is a homage, and in spite of being much newer and very expensive, the original is still so much better in so many ways. https://www.solidigm.com/content/solidigm/us/en/products/data-center/d7/p5810.html https://www.solidigm.com/content/solidigm/us/en/products/dat... You also end up paying for what I assume is a circa six figure drive, if you are substituting DWPD with more capacity than you need. There's something elegant about being able to keep using your cells, versus overbuying on cells with the intent to be able to rip through them relatively quickly.
  - mapt 8mo ago
    We don't care about (TBW/TB) at the consumer level, we care about (TBW/$), and 3D TLC was far, far cheaper per TB, so much so that TBW/$ was not a numerical advantage of Optane. That left ONLY the near-RAM-read-latency, which is only highly beneficial on specific workloads. Then they didn't invest in expanding killer app software that could utilize that latency, and didn't drop prices sufficiently to make it highly competitive with big RAMdisks.
    - Dylan16807 8mo ago
      In 2018, with Optane drives launching around $1.50/GB and TLC flash drives around $0.15/GB, it wasn't that much cheaper. As far as I'm aware Optane had a lot more than 10x the endurance.
PunchyHamster 8mo ago
So instead of replacing every 5 years you replace every 5 years because if you need that level of performance you're replacing servers every 5 years anyway

wtallis 8mo ago

Optane was in the market during a time when the mainstream trend in the SSD industry was all about sacrificing endurance to get higher capacity. It's been several years, and I'm not seeing a lot of regrets from folks who moved to TLC and QLC NAND, and those products are more popular than ever. The niche that could actually make use of Optane's endurance was small and shrinking, and Intel had no roadmap to significantly improve Optane's $/GB which was unquestionably the technology's biggest weakness.

raron 8mo ago
> I'm not seeing a lot of regrets from folks who moved to TLC and QLC NAND, and those products are more popular than ever. That's interesting. Even TLC has huge limitations, but QLC is basically useless unless you use it as write-once-read-many memory. I wish I have bought a lot of SSDs when you could still buy MLC ones.
- wtallis 8mo ago
  > QLC is basically useless unless you use it as write-once-read-many memory The market thoroughly disagrees with your stupid exaggeration. QLC is a high-volume mainstream product. It's popular in low-end consumer SSDs, where the main problem is not endurance but sustained performance (especially writing to a mostly-full drive). A Windows PC is hardly a WORM workload.
  - fc417fc802 8mo ago
    Seems like it is though? Most consumer usage does not have much churn. For things like the browser cache that do churn the total volume isn't that high. The comparison here is database and caching workloads in the datacenter that experience high churn at an extremely high sustained volume. Many such workloads exist.
    - wtallis 8mo ago
      There's a very big difference between a workload where you have to take care to structure your IO to minimize writes so you don't burn out the drive, and a workload that is simply easy enough that you don't have to care about the write endurance because even the crappy drives will last for years.
      - fc417fc802 8mo ago
        Of course. The inferior but cheaper technology is more cost effective in most cases but for certain workloads that won't be the case despite being more affordable per unit upfront. The workloads flash is more cost effective for (ie most of them) either aren't all that write heavy or alternatively leave the drive sitting idle the vast majority of the time. The typical consumer usecase is primarily reads while it mostly sits idle, with the relevant performance metrics largely determined by occasional bursts of activity.
    - Dylan16807 8mo ago
      Consumer usage does not have much churn, but the average desktop is probably doing 5-50 drive writes per year. That's far away from a heavy database load, but it's just as far away from WORM.

mapt 8mo ago

Write endurance of the drive would be measured in TBW, and TLC flash kept adding enough 3D layers to stay cheap enough, quickly enough, that Optane never really beat their pricing per TBW to make a practical product. I have to wonder if it isn't usable for some kind of specialized AI workflow that would benefit from extremely low latency reads but which is isn't written often, at this point. Perhaps integrated in a GPU board.

jauntywundrkind 8mo ago
The extra capacity of modern SSD is a good point, especially now that we have 100TB+ SSD. But Optane still offered 100 DWPD (drive writes per day), up to 3.2TB. Thats still just so many more DWPD than flash ssd. A Kioxia CM8V for example will do 12TB at 3 DWPD. The net TBW is still 10x apart. You can get back to high endurance with SLC drives like the Solidigm p7-p5810, but you're back down to 1.6TB and 50 DWPD, so, 1/4 the Intel P5800X endurance, and worse latencies. I highly suspect the drive model here is a homage, and in spite of being much newer and very expensive, the original is still so much better in so many ways. https://www.solidigm.com/content/solidigm/us/en/products/data-center/d7/p5810.html https://www.solidigm.com/content/solidigm/us/en/products/dat... You also end up paying for what I assume is a circa six figure drive, if you are substituting DWPD with more capacity than you need. There's something elegant about being able to keep using your cells, versus overbuying on cells with the intent to be able to rip through them relatively quickly.
- mapt 8mo ago
  We don't care about (TBW/TB) at the consumer level, we care about (TBW/$), and 3D TLC was far, far cheaper per TB, so much so that TBW/$ was not a numerical advantage of Optane. That left ONLY the near-RAM-read-latency, which is only highly beneficial on specific workloads. Then they didn't invest in expanding killer app software that could utilize that latency, and didn't drop prices sufficiently to make it highly competitive with big RAMdisks.
  - Dylan16807 8mo ago
    In 2018, with Optane drives launching around $1.50/GB and TLC flash drives around $0.15/GB, it wasn't that much cheaper. As far as I'm aware Optane had a lot more than 10x the endurance.

PunchyHamster 8mo ago

So instead of replacing every 5 years you replace every 5 years because if you need that level of performance you're replacing servers every 5 years anyway