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

[SpaceGhostC2C]

3 hours ago, Sniperfox47 said:

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.

No, it does not. The option C was already there, that's what you keep missing.

 

A) Buy 5 1TB SSDs (as already stated, I don't even consider this an option, but apparently people love to bring this up).

 

B) Buy 5 TB HDDs (not necessarily one - no reason why you can't have 5TB of RAID storage, which would increase performance)

 

C) Buy 5 TB HHDs and a small SSD

 

D) Buy 5 TB HHDs and an even smaller Optane

 

and C and D cost the same.

 

Comparing D to A is stupid. Comparing D to C is stupid. Until someone brings a good reason why the real-world cost-effectiveness of D is better than C, there is no argument. Frankly, the insistence on discussing irrelevant alternatives like A or B makes me think that such reason doesn't exist.

[Sniperfox47]

Just now, SpaceGhostC2C said:

No, it does not. The option C was already there, that's what you keep missing.

 

A) Buy 5 1TB SSDs (as already stated, I don't even consider this an option, but apparently people love to bring this up).

 

B) Buy 5 TB HDDs (not necessarily one - no reason why you can't have 5TB of RAID storage, which would increase performance)

 

C) Buy 5 TB HHDs and a small SSD

 

D) Buy 5 TB HHDs and an even smaller Optane

 

and C and D cost the same.

 

Comparing D to A is stupid. Comparing D to C is stupid. Until someone brings a good reason why the real-world cost-effectiveness of D is better than C, there is no argument. Frankly, the insistence on discussing irrelevant alternatives like A or B makes me think that such reason doesn't exist.

Except the performance on small traditional SSDs isn't ideal for use as a cache drive.

 

32 and 64GB SSDs have trash performance because they don't have enough NAND chips.

 

128GB and 256GB SSDs are better but they are still not ideal for use as cache due to pretty poor performance at low queue depths.

 

And by the time you're hitting 512GB SSDs you're looking at options substantially more expensive than an Optane cache, and have cache performance that's worse.

 

SRT with a traditional SSD is great. I have been a big proponent of it in the past few years, but the difference between using a traditional NVMe drive and an Optane drive for the cache is going to be night and day.

[Zodiark1593]

I actually really like Optane, not because I can take advantage of it (heck, my H97 board doesn't even support NVME for some reason), but because I don't need to teach users to install their programs to other drives within the system. Business PCs may benefit too, Lord Gaben knows those have been stuck in the HDD dark ages for far too long. 

 

For very small form factors, I could see this integrated onto the motherboard directly with its own internal PCI-e lanes. 

 

Though, as SSD storage falls further in price, Optane may be quickly rendered redundant. 

[Sniperfox47]

1 minute ago, Zodiark1593 said:

I actually really like Optane, not because I can take advantage of it (heck, my H97 board doesn't even support NVME for some reason), but because I don't need to teach users to install their programs to other drives within the system. Business PCs may benefit too, Lord Gaben knows those have been stuck in the HDD dark ages for far too long. 

 

For very small form factors, I could see this integrated onto the motherboard directly with its own internal PCI-e lanes. 

 

Though, as SSD storage falls further in price, Optane may be quickly rendered redundant. 

Optane cache may be, but keep in mind this is only an afterthought anyways. The main purpose behind Optane down the road is Storage Class Memory/Non-Volatile RAM(NVRAM).

 

When SSDs replace HDDs in high storage applications Optane cache will have very little use, but its usefulness as NVRAM will have even more of a benefit, especially in the server market.

[Zodiark1593]

24 minutes ago, Sniperfox47 said:

Optane cache may be, but keep in mind this is only an afterthought anyways. The main purpose behind Optane down the road is Storage Class Memory/Non-Volatile RAM(NVRAM).

 

When SSDs replace HDDs in high storage applications Optane cache will have very little use, but its usefulness as NVRAM will have even more of a benefit, especially in the server market.

Expandable Optane Cache for video cards... 

 

A shame Intel doesn't actually make video cards. 

[Sniperfox47]

8 minutes ago, Zodiark1593 said:

Expandable Optane Cache for video cards... 

 

A shame Intel doesn't actually make video cards. 

I wonder how this would perform with those Radeon Pro cards that take SSDs as pagedrives :3

[ARikozuM]

18 minutes ago, Zodiark1593 said:

Expandable Optane Cache for video cards... 

VGAs used to have expandable memory. It would be rather interesting if Optane could be used in this manner as long as the old problem doesn't resurface.

[Zodiark1593]

11 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

VGAs used to have expandable memory. It would be rather interesting if Optane could be used in this manner as long as the old problem doesn't resurface.

I've one such card laying around myself. I could probably see several being used on a single card to maximize speeds.