I really can't wait to see these drives in real-world benchmarks. I just don't get who these drives are marketed to, or how they make any sense at all. I get the feeling that they were in development as a faster m.2 option to SSDs when SSDs were still having trouble saturating the SATA3 interface... and then they were stuck in development so long that they lost their use-case by the time the product materialized. I mean lets look at a few segments for a sec:
1) Ultra low end PC that use this to cache a HDD. Yes, it will offer more performance.... but it will also add tens if not hundreds of dollars to the price tag in a market that is very price sensitive. So that isn't going to work.
2) Midrange PCs, being used to cache a HDD. Sure... it is still going to offer faster performance. But again it adds unnecessary complexity, config, and expense to the system. Plus SSDs are continuing to fall in price, and nobody is having issues selling devices with 256GB SSDs on board. X-Point plus a 1TB HDD? Or a system with a single 256-512GB SSD? I think most people at this point would take the SSD.
3) High end PCs: Here X-Point starts to make sense... but as a drive technology. Only issue is that the drive is no where near large enough (just as 32GB wasn't large enough back when SSDs were used to cache HDDs 6-8 years ago!). So, we can cache the most used 32GB, and have the rest of the data on slow, noisy HDDs.... or we can use our m.2 slot for a single larger SSD that has all of our commonly used stuff on it, and a HDD for the stuff that doesn't matter for performance.
4) So then the pro-server market will surely be able to put this to work then... But no, again it is ONLY 32GB in size! I mean, does intel not look at how much RAM is being put in servers these days? The 4 year old servers in my school district each have 32GB of ram on board... and I work in a poor, small-ish school district that doesn't even care much about technology! These days it is common to see servers with 64-128GB as a STARTING amount of ram installed! Plus, the RAM is still faster than x-Point, has a known track record, and programs are designed to utilize it!
Yes, X-Point does have a few handy features like being persistant through a power failure... but just how common are those? Again, small-town school district, and we have 2 PSUs in our servers, so each is attached to 2 APC battery backups. When power goes out we have a solid 1-2 hours for the power to come back on, or for everything to be saved to disk as the servers spin down gracefully. Businesses have 2 seperate circuits run to ther servers, with backup generators, and failsafes in place... Power just doesn't 'turn off' in these settings... and when they do there is plenty of time to spin everything down gracefully.
When I first hear of X-Point I thought it was a new storage method to REPLACE RAM and HDDs entirely. Want to load up MS Office? Flag it as 'on' and it is open. Flag it as 'off' and it is closed. Want to turn your PC on? just apply power, as it is allready set to go. No need to transfer data from disk to RAM, just cut it all out. Sure, it would be a little expensive, and it might be a little slower than RAM... but it would be such a paradigm shift that it would demand attention, and would eventually take over the market as the price eventually fell.
But no, it is just a HDD cache just like their last caching technology. Too slow, too expensive, and too complicated ever to see the light of day in the real world outside of weird niche uses.
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