Intel Optane 3D XPoint Memory Review

[DerekA_C]

Meanwhile open standard and not making Intel more of a monoply screw intel they are bad business and bad for consumers period...
http://www.anandtech.com/show/11238/ddr5-to-double-bandwidth-over-ddr4-specification-due-next-year

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9969/jedec-publishes-hbm2-specification

 

[ah]

It's slower than the Evo 960, so what is the point? Which is the cheapest: Buying the Evo 960 with your existing motherboard or throw away your existing motherboard and buy a new motherboard with Optane enable

 

[ah]

Toms' page here has bug, it has just altered my keyboard letter, eg a '?' becames an 'S'. I had to restart my computer to be able to use my keyboard again. I think from now on, I will be very reluctant to visit Tomshardware.

 

[C4lculus]

I thought this would be a flash killer.

 

[WyomingKnott]

Keep in mind that this is a first commercial release. I'm not particularly excited by this product. Wow, another form of cache for a spinning hard drive. Snore.

However, think of it as a starting point. At first SSDs were ridiculously expensive (remember all the "I'll buy one when it's under $x per GB" comments?), and were so small in affordable sizes that Intel had to invent a way to use them as cache to make them useful. The technology matured, and now it's mainstream for enthusiasts. Perhaps 3D XPoint will follow the same path, and we will all benefit.

SSD manufacturers are having to move to more bits per cell, with resulting degradation of life and performance. So this technology just might come along in the nick of time and rescue the progress of durable storage. It would have to be selling in huge amounts as a commodity to become a flash killer, though.

 

[Uniblab]

I thought this would be a flash killer.

You gotta keep in mind that flash ssd's for consumers started out the same way. Check out "Wyomingknott" post. He gets it. As soon as things ramp up - remember that enterprise can already buy 375 gig x-point drives - we get to see if the same performance increase delivered to enterprise will translate to consumers. It may not be a killer but I bet that early adopters will put their boot partition on optane and gain a few more seconds off their boot time. Imagine an optane boot drive, a ram drive based on your systems 3200mhz ddr4 ram and ssds for storage with a few hdd's for backup stotage. I bet a 5 second boot is possible. Would I do it. Yeah. Would I brag about my 5 seconds? Maybe humble.

 

[Uniblab]

the current deal breaker is wheter the price, nor the "missing" performance compared to high end flash devices...

it's 90 k write cycles from my rough calculations - intel promised "unlimited write cycles and similar data retention, which would made this drive perfect for OS + heaviely used files storage... imagine you have not to fill your even more expansive ram with all the graphik drivers and so on...

The review on pcper may satisfy your interests.

The somewhat available enterprise 375gig models show that even though expensive r/w speeds approach 2gig per sec @ 1queue depth! I read a few reviews that tested it - on intels server - and were astounded that this first iteretion of optane exceeded their expectations. Some say that it is a serious contender in the storage market:

At 50/50 reads/writes, latency QoS for the DC P4800X is 30x better than the competition.
While the Optane SSD is operating near 2GB/s the flash SSDs spend most of the test only slightly above 500MB/s.

I am of the type that remembers the early days of ssd's. If you are too, you remember being able to spend large sums of money for a sata ssd that could barely be used as a boot drive. SSD's and we have come a long way. The way of optane is just beginning. We havent even yet been able to get a review of the 375 gig enterprise model - on the reviewers own hardware. I wonder whats to come in the near future.

 

[jimmysmitty]

Keep in mind that this is a first commercial release. I'm not particularly excited by this product. Wow, another form of cache for a spinning hard drive. Snore.

However, think of it as a starting point. At first SSDs were ridiculously expensive (remember all the "I'll buy one when it's under $x per GB" comments?), and were so small in affordable sizes that Intel had to invent a way to use them as cache to make them useful. The technology matured, and now it's mainstream for enthusiasts. Perhaps 3D XPoint will follow the same path, and we will all benefit.

SSD manufacturers are having to move to more bits per cell, with resulting degradation of life and performance. So this technology just might come along in the nick of time and rescue the progress of durable storage. It would have to be selling in huge amounts as a commodity to become a flash killer, though.

Pretty much.

As I have said before this is the stepping point. Intel needs to make some of its R&D money back then it will start to push out the more exciting stuff like NVDIMMs.

 

[Lemar Bonquiqui]

Would Octane work with a 6600k and a z170 board with DDR3? Even though it's not supported?

 

[WyomingKnott]

If it's not supported, then it won't work.

 

[jameyk14]

Is it possible to configure this Optane Memory simple as needed inde9logical drive? We have an embedded application that could uses this design for a Journaling requirement and replace a legacy SRAM logical drive

 

[jameyk14]

Is it possible to confi7this as a simple separate logical drive? Or must it be combined with a drive for the described cache functionality

 

[slyguy]

curious as how to set up Optane Memory SSD as a cache with Optane + NVMe SSD

 

[CRamseyer]

curious as how to set up Optane Memory SSD as a cache with Optane + NVMe SSD

We used the SRT to build the Optane + NVMe cache on a Z77 chipset.