Why are Optane SSD insanely expensive ?

[PDifolco]

For example Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X is like $3000 for less than 500GB, wtf ?

They don't  are really faster than standard NVMe costing 10 times less, what are their advantage to warrant  such high price ?

[Sant_HH]

Higher random I/O speeds and reliability due to using enterprise-grade NAND as the DC in the name suggests

[jaslion]

It's enterprise grade stuff.

 

That and these drives are made entirely of fast flash storage instead of the usual tiered speed structure of normal drives.

[porina]

Several things:

1, Optane is just more expensive to make. It is essentially only made by Intel, whereas there is a lot of volume and different manufacturers of flash

2a, Its performance is way higher, but that only benefits if you have a workload that can make use of it. It can handle small/random reads a lot better than flash.

2b, Its endurance (per capacity) is way higher than flash.

3, Don't compare enterprise parts with consumer level ones. P4800X is an enterprise part. Better look at consumer models like the 900p 480GB which launched at $599.

 

If you don't need the real benefits of Optane, then yes it just looks expensive compared to flash. I used a 900p in my previous desktop gaming build and I didn't get benefit from it. So for the current build I downgraded to a Samsung 980 Pro as good enough.

[porina]

4 minutes ago, Sant_HH said:

Higher random I/O speeds and reliability due to using enterprise-grade NAND as the DC in the name suggests

Optane doesn't use NAND.

 

2 minutes ago, jaslion said:

That and these drives are made entirely of fast flash storage instead of the usual tiered speed structure of normal drives.

Optane isn't flash based.

[Sant_HH]

8 minutes ago, porina said:

Optane doesn't use NAND.

Thanks for correcting I forgot that optane doesn't use NAND. It uses intel's own chips(I forgot what's it called)

Edit- after some research it apparently called 3D Xpoint Memory 

Edited May 1, 2022 by Sant_HH