Who exactly are the new super cheap Optane drives for? Seems to me like no one is going to buy them.

[ARikozuM]

2 minutes ago, Bcat00 said:

I highly doubt anyone that can afford a Kabylake cpu is hard pressed for money to get a 500g/1TB SSD. 

 

If they are hard pressed for money then the builder or whoever chose the parts need to redo their list.

Happens plenty often on this forum. It's not a matter of "I have the money" as it is "how do I make the most of it".

240GB SSD for $100 or 120GB SSD + 1TB HDD for $100? Switching out the SSD is easier in the long run as prices will be coming down on NAND. It's a case of needs vs wants.

[Bcat00]

1 minute ago, ARikozuM said:

Happens plenty often on this forum. It's not a matter of "I have the money" as it is "how do I make the most of it".

240GB SSD for $100 or 120GB SSD + 1TB HDD for $100? Switching out the SSD is easier in the long run as prices will be coming down on NAND. It's a case of needs vs wants.

If i'm not mistaken, this new thing costs 80$ us or cad currency i cant remember, so do your math. Does it make sense for a regular person to buy it after adding in the ssd and hdd or simply get the bigger ssd.

 

the only demand i can see for this is small time business that runs a server and cant afford lots of ssd for their raid.

[Sniperfox47]

3 minutes ago, Bcat00 said:

If i'm not mistaken, this new thing costs 80$ us or cad currency i cant remember, so do your math. Does it make sense for a regular person to buy it after adding in the ssd and hdd or simply get the bigger ssd.

 

the only demand i can see for this is small time business that runs a server and cant afford lots of ssd for their raid.

If I'm building a small media storage system? Definitely. I can buy an 5tb hard drive and a 32GB system accelerator for the same price as a 1tb ssd.

[Bcat00]

That too will work too.

[ARikozuM]

2 minutes ago, Sniperfox47 said:

If I'm building a small media storage system? Definitely. I can buy an 5tb hard drive and a 32GB system accelerator for the same price as a 1tb ssd.

HTPCs can also benefit since some cases don't hold more than one drive.

[Sniperfox47]

2 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

HTPCs can also benefit since some cases don't hold more than one drive.

Absolutely. And the best part of these system accelerators is that they don't suffer from the poor performance of small SSDs. Like a 16GB ssd would typically have performance not much better than a USB flash drive. But these 16 and 32GB system accelerators have performance that outclasses the 2tb version of a 960 pro at low queue depths and comes increadibly close at the higher queue depths where the 960 pro shines.

 

There are definitely applications for these drives and I'm very interested in picking them up if they're not locked to Windows like Intel SRT is.

[xentropa]

3 hours ago, Sniperfox47 said:

Absolutely. And the best part of these system accelerators is that they don't suffer from the poor performance of small SSDs. Like a 16GB ssd would typically have performance not much better than a USB flash drive. But these 16 and 32GB system accelerators have performance that outclasses the 2tb version of a 960 pro at low queue depths and comes increadibly close at the higher queue depths where the 960 pro shines.

 

There are definitely applications for these drives and I'm very interested in picking them up if they're not locked to Windows like Intel SRT is.

 

If current Flash based SSDs suffer poor performance in low queue depth environments (which I believe is true) could't they fix that problem by adding like let's say a 1gb DDR4 DRAM of cache memory with an advanced ARM based microprocessor to write data to the flash cells?  If the dram cache isnt filled to the brim faster than it can be "page dumped" within the flash cells write latency, then I can't imagine any difference in performance.

[ARikozuM]

15 minutes ago, xentropa said:

 

If current Flash based SSDs suffer poor performance in low queue depth environments (which I believe is true) could't they fix that problem by adding like let's say a 1gb DDR4 DRAM of cache memory with an advanced ARM based microprocessor to write data to the flash cells?  If the dram cache isnt filled to the brim faster than it can be "page dumped" within the flash cells write latency, then I can't imagine any difference in performance.

The problems are the things between the SSD and the CPU.

[Spork829]

4 hours ago, Sniperfox47 said:

There are definitely applications for these drives and I'm very interested in picking them up if they're not locked to Windows like Intel SRT is.

If I'm not mistaken I think they said Optane is only compatible with Windows 10...

[mrchow19910319]

Dell/ Lenovo / HP can put these drives into their "gaming" systems and charge a lot more than $77. 

The "not so tech savy" customers will pay for it. 

[xentropa]

A comment on EETIMEs suggests that the Optane conforms to JES218B-01 spec for storage memory devices.  This means that the device has been tested to achieve a minimum data retention time (time before written data is randomly lost but not necessarily device malfunction) of 3 months at 40C or 1 year at 30C.

[ARikozuM]

12 hours ago, mrchow19910319 said:

Dell/ Lenovo / HP can put these drives into their "gaming" systems and charge a lot more than $77. 

The "not so tech savy" customers will pay for it. 

Don't they always...

[mrchow19910319]

Just now, ARikozuM said:

Don't they always...

Marketing works! 

[minibois]

I suspect Optane memory is more of a prototype thing

[ARikozuM]

50 minutes ago, Minibois said:

I suspect Optane memory is more of a prototype thing

I doubt it. They've been trying to do this for years and they just now got something worth putting to market.

[minibois]

28 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

I doubt it. They've been trying to do this for years and they just now got something worth putting to market.

It also somewhat sounds like a 'scratch disk'. But I doubt Intel is expecting this to get as big as SSD's for example.

[Princess Luna]

Honestly I also can not see why wouldn't any one go for a cheap decent SATA 3 SSD + HDD for storage. This product makes little sense in cost to performance to start with, sure that some can come up with justifications for its use but should we really be trying to defend Intel for a poorly thought out product?

[Bleedingyamato]

6 minutes ago, Princess Cadence said:

Honestly I also can not see why wouldn't any one go for a cheap decent SATA 3 SSD + HDD for storage. This product makes little sense in cost to performance to start with, sure that some can come up with justifications for its use but should we really be trying to defend Intel for a poorly thought out product?

Perhaps not?    Maybe Intel needs a hug and someone to tell them "it'll be ok.  You'll do better next time.  ?"

[SpaceGhostC2C]

22 hours ago, ARikozuM said:

HTPCs can also benefit since some cases don't hold more than one drive.

But if you have an M.2 slot for Optane, you have an M.2 slot for PCIe or even SATA SSD, regardless of case...

 

Anyway, you know this can't be very useful when the best that can be said about it is "boots faster than an HDD" or "it's cheaper than 1TB SSD"... 

In day to day use, money is better spent on a SATA3 SSD as system+programs drive than a faster cache drive, holding HDD storage constant. And with mSATA and M.2 slots (the latter is a requirement for Optane anyway, so the discussion only exists if an M.2 slot is present to begin with), not even space is a constraint for dual drives. I frankly don't see how having two drives can be a complication for anyone, but even if it was, those customers are not going to build their own systems, and prebuilts and laptops come with everything pre-installed anyway, so it requires no effort from the user either.

[SilentXer0]

with current sizes i don't see a use for enthusiasts,

But by releasing them in smaller sizes they will be able to refine the tech to lower cost and hopefully make larger drives available.

 

3.7 gb/s is what linus claimed the speed is on optane and the rated read speed of a 950 pro nvme drive is only 2.5 gb/s

there could be some performance to be had.

 

 

i have a 7700k, 200 series chipset and ssd/hdd system.   I plan to pick one up to see what kind of performance improvements if any over what I'm running.

if it's only $50 why not right?

 

 

[Edward.s]

correct me if im wrong but, optane drive does not require user to manually move around files (more like a sshd?). i'm expecting to see it more in a pre-build system 

[Sniperfox47]

9 hours ago, Princess Cadence said:

Honestly I also can not see why wouldn't any one go for a cheap decent SATA 3 SSD + HDD for storage. This product makes little sense in cost to performance to start with, sure that some can come up with justifications for its use but should we really be trying to defend Intel for a poorly thought out product?

 

9 hours ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

But if you have an M.2 slot for Optane, you have an M.2 slot for PCIe or even SATA SSD, regardless of case...

 

Anyway, you know this can't be very useful when the best that can be said about it is "boots faster than an HDD" or "it's cheaper than 1TB SSD"... 

In day to day use, money is better spent on a SATA3 SSD as system+programs drive than a faster cache drive, holding HDD storage constant. And with mSATA and M.2 slots (the latter is a requirement for Optane anyway, so the discussion only exists if an M.2 slot is present to begin with), not even space is a constraint for dual drives. I frankly don't see how having two drives can be a complication for anyone, but even if it was, those customers are not going to build their own systems, and prebuilts and laptops come with everything pre-installed anyway, so it requires no effort from the user either.

The whole point of these is the low latency of these drives and the fact that they're byte addressable make them far more efficient and speedy caches. A big part of the reason why Intel doesn't allow SSD caches bigger than 64GB for SRT is because after about 32GB the performance drops off *FAST*.

 

These drives perform *substantially* better than any other 16GB, 32GB or even 128GB drives on the market, are better suited for cache than *any* drives on the market due to their latency and performance at low queue depths, are a *MUCH* cheaper option for certain applications than big 1tb SSDs where the performance would be on par, and are just plain better options than anything on the market if you're looking purely for an Intel SRT cache.

 

I also got talking to some people and it seems like you don't *HAVE* to use them with Intel SRT either, so if you're on Linux they should work fine with third party options like bcache and bcachefs.

[Verrm]

On 28.03.2017 at 8:57 PM, Sniperfox47 said:

Just to clarify: Optane System Accelerators (the 16/32GB cache) do not have much benefit for enthusiast users building desktop machines.

 

The two places where they shine are:

 

A) Joe Consumer who buys a computer and installs everything to the default C directory because they don't know or care enough to change it. A big hard drive with Optane is probably going to be more desirable for storing pictures and movies on than a super expensive or tiny SSD, because of the added complication of trying to manage a second drive.

 

B)  Jane Consumer who's buying a laptop and needs decent storage space, but still wants snappy performance.

 

Laptops and general consumer systems are the two big markets for this tech, not enthusiast desktops.

Totally agree. It looks like we, that are tech-aware guys shouldn't discuss much technology that is developed purely for people that don't give a shit, need storage for photos/movies and still want fast system. They wouldn't buy 2TB SSD for any reasonable money.

 

On the other hand... It's all about how enterprises address the need. Microsoft could implement in Windows a system to automatically create one big virtual drive from all available drives and in the background allocate files to physical drives basing on their type/use. If it was implemented well it would make Optane useless. And probably shorten SSD's lifespan, but why would average consumer care?

[SpaceGhostC2C]

8 hours ago, Sniperfox47 said:

 

The whole point of these is the low latency of these drives and the fact that they're byte addressable make them far more efficient and speedy caches. A big part of the reason why Intel doesn't allow SSD caches bigger than 64GB for SRT is because after about 32GB the performance drops off *FAST*.

 

These drives perform *substantially* better than any other 16GB, 32GB or even 128GB drives on the market, are better suited for cache than *any* drives on the market due to their latency and performance at low queue depths,

I understand the theoretical differences, but I thought the point of this thread was the real-world differences in performance and user experience, and ultimately who should get into this (i.e., who would see any significant real-world difference so as to compensate the cost and the platform limitations.

 

8 hours ago, Sniperfox47 said:

 

are a *MUCH* cheaper option for certain applications than big 1tb SSDs where the performance would be on par

I guess I'm repeating myself at this point, but I will never get why people keep talking about 1TB SSDs. 1TB SSDs ar ethe most irrelevant comparison possible here. Being cheaper than a 1TB SSD is like being cheaper than a Titan GPU

This isn't cheaper than buying a SATA3 SSD to use as system drive. And despite its technical advantages on paper, because it's a cache drive and not a normal drive, Optane+HDD is inferior to SSD+HDD, while costing the same.

 

There may be a server application in which cache drives make sense to begin with, and they may benefit for this particular fast cache type. I continue to see no use case in desktop computers.

[Sniperfox47]

59 minutes ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

I understand the theoretical differences, but I thought the point of this thread was the real-world differences in performance and user experience, and ultimately who should get into this (i.e., who would see any significant real-world difference so as to compensate the cost and the platform limitations.

 

I guess I'm repeating myself at this point, but I will never get why people keep talking about 1TB SSDs. 1TB SSDs ar ethe most irrelevant comparison possible here. Being cheaper than a 1TB SSD is like being cheaper than a Titan GPU

This isn't cheaper than buying a SATA3 SSD to use as system drive. And despite its technical advantages on paper, because it's a cache drive and not a normal drive, Optane+HDD is inferior to SSD+HDD, while costing the same.

 

There may be a server application in which cache drives make sense to begin with, and they may benefit for this particular fast cache type. I continue to see no use case in desktop computers.

That's the whole point though. If you need 5tb of storage, what are your options?

 

A) buy 5 1tb SSDs? Does the $4000 price point make sense?

 

B) Buy a 5tb HDD? The performance is kinda meh.

 

This gives you an option C that lets you compromise a bit and get far better performance than a traditional hard drive, or even Hybrid drive.