Intel Optane Memory Now Available

[wizard69]

It's faster alright. Will a normal user notice if no hints were given on storage media? I bet not. Cheap? If you count a markup of 4-8x for the storage size compared to a good SSD as cheap, then yeah.

I'm nt even sure it is fast enough to really notice at all. They are claiming 5-6 times faster than a hard drive but SSD's are already faster in many respects.

[kneekoo]

Note: The SATA-based storage device must have Windows* 10 64bit installed, be formatted for GPT partition and have at least 5MB of continuous unallocated space at the end of the boot volume.

Yeah, and you have to install it on full moon, in an odd-numbered month, and definitely not on a Tuesday, because that's when Microsoft shoves updates down your throat. Whatever...

This feels weird as a product. I'm sure there are people still using HDDs for storage but this memory is certainly not for the average user. Who buys the latest and greatest Intel platform and not use an SSD, but buy an Optane memory for more speed? So this product addresses a small niche. I wonder what's Intel thinking and what are we missing. It is useful, but there were plenty of cool and useful technologies that were axed before release or soon after, just because their market wasn't big enough. Just weird.

[torsionbar28]

This feels weird as a product. I'm sure there are people still using HDDs for storage but this memory is certainly not for the average user. Who buys the latest and greatest Intel platform and not use an SSD, but buy an Optane memory for more speed? So this product addresses a small niche. I wonder what's Intel thinking and what are we missing. It is useful, but there were plenty of cool and useful technologies that were axed before release or soon after, just because their market wasn't big enough. Just weird.

Phoney product, designed for maximum hype, to take headlines away from AMD during Ryzen launch. That's all it is. Dirty corporate tactics. As you pointed out, it simply doesn't fit into the current market, and nobody is going to buy it.

[torsionbar28]

Small and fast ssds do not exist. 32GB would certainly be enough.

They do in the enterprise space. There's no consumer market for a high speed 32 GB SSD. But then again, if you're using a consumer drive (low write durability) as a high speed disk cache, you want more space than required, so that you can get acceptable life via wear-leveling. Buy a 250 GB consumer SSD and create a 32 GB partition on it - the remaining 218 GB is effectively your "over provisioning" space to account for wear.

[johnc]

Optane was always a hype train.

[sunweb]

This is surprisingly cheap, especially if that's the technology that blows SSDs out of the water.

Its not cheap and it doesn't blow SSD out of anything, did you see tests? It can beat SATA3 SSD and their own slow and fail 600p, thats all. You can see that even tech sites do what Intel said(atleast for a bought time, launch time is important consumers rarely check anything after that) and don't put any competitive NVMe drives to the test.

Damn, i was waiting for memristors or anything like that since 2013 and when Intel announced Optane to hit the shelves this century i bought on hype only to be taken down. HDD cache(only 32 GB) for $77 is a bit too much.

[M@yeulC]

Its not cheap and it doesn't blow SSD out of anything, did you see tests? It can beat SATA3 SSD and their own slow and fail 600p, thats all. You can see that even tech sites do what Intel said(atleast for a bought time, launch time is important consumers rarely check anything after that) and don't put any competitive NVMe drives to the test.

Damn, i was waiting for memristors or anything like that since 2013 and when Intel announced Optane to hit the shelves this century i bought on hype only to be taken down. HDD cache(only 32 GB) for $77 is a bit too much.

Yeah, I saw the benchmarks since posting this. I also thought this was memristor-based. So, expensive and slow. Go along, nothing to see here.

On the other hand, this might actually be something promising. I I got it correctly, the tech at least has potential for denser memory cells, with less controller logic. That would not be revolutionary, but very welcome nevertheless.

I am still waiting for my Memristor-based NVRAM

[edgmnt]

Well, even cheap SSDs are usually faster than HDDs and larger than Optane. The extra capacity also adds up to performance and durability when used as a cache, so it's not really clear how Intel's stuff stands against a plain SSD.

And I'm not sure what options one has on Windows platforms. It may make some sense in that market, if there's are no good bcache-like solutions available. Given the announced sizes, I suspect this is meant as a quick and cheap upgrade for lower-end builds, so scaling might not be very relevant.

[Serafean]

So basically something between hybrid drives and bcache. Implemented in the bios. Really not impressed...

[tuke81]

So basically something between hybrid drives and bcache. Implemented in the bios. Really not impressed...

Well latency is down compared to ssds, those 4k results are great. But yeah optane memory is quite uninteresting, maybe one might try to replace usual tmpfs tweaks if it fairs on them. But really just waiting that third product stack from intel(Intel® Optane™ Solid State Drives for Consumers).