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> were those weird hybrid SSDs even implemented by actual hardware, or were they part of the giant series of massive kludges They were definitely part of the s
by wtallis 7mo ago
> were those weird hybrid SSDs even implemented by actual hardware, or were they part of the giant series of massive kludges
They were definitely part of the series of massive kludges. But aside from the Intel platforms they were marketed for, I never found a PCIe host that could see both of the NVMe devices on the drive. Some hosts would bring up the x2 link to the Optane half of the drive, some hosts would bring up the x2 link to the QLC half of the drive, but I couldn't find any way to get both links active even when the drive was connected downstream of a PCIe switch that definitely had hardware support for bifurcation down to x2 links. I suspect that with appropriate firmware hacking on the host side, it may have been possible to get those drives fully operational on a non-Intel host.
- amluto 7mo agoWhy on Earth did Intel implement this as a 2x2 device? They could have implemented multiple functions or they could have used a PCIe switch or they could have exposed their device as an NVMe device with multiple namespaces, etc. (I won’t swear that all of these would have worked nicely. But all of them would have performed better than arbitrarily splitting the link in half.) Maybe they didn’t own any of the IP for the conventional SSD part and couldn’t make it play ball?
- fc417fc802 7mo agoOr perhaps they just made a number of incredibly poor decisions. They seem to have been doing that for the better part of a couple decades now.
- wtallis 7mo agoThe Optane side of the drive used the same x2 controller as the pure-Optane cache drives. The NAND side used a Silicon Motion controller, same as their consumer QLC drives of the era. They almost literally just crammed their two existing consumer products onto one PCB and shipped it. Intel was never interested enough in the consumer applications of Optane to design a good, useful SSD controller around it, and they weren't going to let a third-party like Silicon Motion make an Optane-compatible controller.
- amluto 7mo agoSigh. They should never have diluted the “Optane” trademark by sticking it on this trash. The actual Optane branded enterprise SSDs were quite nice, although they were not easy to shop for.