uglyduckling81 :
"Optane's Earth Shattering Performance" - does it though?
It has low latency, sure. But it's transfer rates are that great are they?
Basically everything I've read about it is it's pretty good but not as good as the Sammy Pro.
The part where Optane drives shine is in QD1 (queue depth = 1; that is, only one transaction to complete). It hits top performance transfer-wise and remains consistent. If you think about it, all data transactions start off with the first one; so the faster you fulfill the first one, the faster you can fulfill the next one. Thus, you generally are fulfilling data requests as fast as they come in & keeping the queue low. The performance level remains high, and usually doesn't hit high queue depths (not including servers, which can have significant & varied loads; of course, and perhaps even more so, Optane drives will shine with servers).
SSDs generally rely on pseudo-SLC caching (small portion of overall storage capacity) to hit peak performance; however, that benefit is gone if the cache is filled up. Also, the max transfer rates of those SSDs are often only seen when the QD is in the QD32 range. So Optane drives should generally feel "snappier" than a regular SSD, and if you need more total transfer bandwith than one individual drive delivers, then you just add more Optane drives (like you would with almost any other storage solution).
Now, for most consumers, I would agree that they could be served just as well with a Samsung SSD as an Optane drive as generally consumers aren't generating much of a storage I/O load. But if you had to have the best, then Optane is the best right now. Personally, I am just waiting for these drives to come down in price (especially price!) and add more capacity. I can justify the price for servers, but it's harder to do so for a personal system.
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