5 ms·
> The ideal usage of optane was as a ZIL in ZFS. It was also the best boot drive money could buy. Still is, I think, though other comments in the thread ask ho
by exmadscientist 7mo ago
> The ideal usage of optane was as a ZIL in ZFS.
It was also the best boot drive money could buy. Still is, I think, though other comments in the thread ask how it compares against today's best, which I'd also love to see.
- gozzoo 7mo agoThis concept was very popular back in the days when computers used to boot from HDD, but now it doesn't make much sense. I wouldn't notice If my laptop boots for 5 sec instead of 10.
- exmadscientist 7mo agoAt the time of their introduction Optane drives were noticeably faster to boot your machine than even the fastest available Flash SSD. So in a workstation with multiple hard drives installed anyway, buying one to boot off of made decent sense. If they had been cheaper, I think they'd have been really, really popular.
- Dylan16807 7mo agoWhat concept was very popular in those days? By my reckoning, there was zero overlap between the period of time where a reasonable computer configurer would pick a hard drive to boot from and the period of time where Optane was available. And even for the general concept of a cache drive, I don't think I've ever seen it do well in the mainstream. Just a few niche roles, and some hybrid drives that sucked because they had small flash chips and only used them as a read cache, not a write cache.