Toshiba Takes On Optane With 3D XL-Flash: High Performance Meets Low Cost

[PaulAlcorn]

Toshiba's super low-latency XL-Flash looks to compete with Intel's Optane.

Toshiba Takes On Optane With 3D XL-Flash: High Performance Meets Low Cost : Read more

 

[jimmysmitty]

The two biggest advantages I see with Optane are the consistent IOPS, where most others tend to fall off after certain QDs Optane typically stays consistent, and the NVDIMMs.

Now NVDIMMs are not available to consumers yet. With Cascade Lake-SP servers they can take Optane NVDIMMs up to 8TB for 8S systems. Once that trickles down to consumers that would be the biggest game changer. To be able to shove 1TB of Optane into a memory slot and allocate 32GB of that to system RAM and the rest to storage will help to remove one of the largest bottlenecks we currently have, disk drives.

Yes NVMe is a big boon to helping that as it uses PCIe lanes its vastly faster than SATA but it still is not as fast as system RAM.

These are the two advantages that Toshiba will have to match to truly compete with it.

 

[derekullo]

I'll take medium sized monitor, small coolant and an extra large flash.

With everything being smaller and faster they sure picked an ambiguous name.

 

[Giroro]

So Toshiba's entire pitch is basically " We invented what is basically an SLC SSD, look how much better it performs vs our terrible QLC and spinning disk HDDs"?
Oh, but you can also pair their fancy new not-SLC with QLC? Who knew this was a new innovation instead of something that is absolutely necessary to make a QLC drive meet basic functionality expectations for low-quality consumer drives ... Neat.

If their pseudo-SLC was really that much better, they would be comparing it to other versions of SLC and 3D Xpoint, instead they feel the need to compare XL-buzzword to the worst-performing NAND ever manufactured.

 

[mikewinddale]

"To be able to shove 1TB of Optane into a memory slot and allocate 32GB of that to system RAM"

I'm not sure that would help. Optane is still much slower than DRAM. Using 32 GB of Optane instead of 32 GB of DRAM will just lower your performance.

The benefit of Optane-as-RAM is that the storage capacity is so much higher. Optane allows datacenters and workstations to have terabytes of what is effectively slow RAM. If you've got a several-terabyte database, then having mere GB of DRAM forces you to keep swapping out portions of the database between RAM and storage. Having TB of Optane as RAM would allow you to keep the entire database in RAM. Even though Optane is slower than DRAM, the benefit of keeping your entire TB database in RAM would more than make up for it.

But if you've got only 32 GB of RAM, then switching to Optane wouldn't benefit you.

 

[jimmysmitty]

"To be able to shove 1TB of Optane into a memory slot and allocate 32GB of that to system RAM"

I'm not sure that would help. Optane is still much slower than DRAM. Using 32 GB of Optane instead of 32 GB of DRAM will just lower your performance.

The benefit of Optane-as-RAM is that the storage capacity is so much higher. Optane allows datacenters and workstations to have terabytes of what is effectively slow RAM. If you've got a several-terabyte database, then having mere GB of DRAM forces you to keep swapping out portions of the database between RAM and storage. Having TB of Optane as RAM would allow you to keep the entire database in RAM. Even though Optane is slower than DRAM, the benefit of keeping your entire TB database in RAM would more than make up for it.

But if you've got only 32 GB of RAM, then switching to Optane wouldn't benefit you.

Optane is still faster than even a PCIe SSD or NVMe. Its not as fast as top end RAM no but it would still be a benefit to performance.