Optane has been commercially available for five years already and it's not used in any device I'm aware of. Assuming it will find broad adoption at this point seems like a bad bet.
Optane in consumer devices is in a weird place. Write durability does not matter, SSD manufacturers reduce rewrite count with every new generation in the name of the cheaper prices and users are happy to accept that downgrade (see Samsung 980 Pro vs Samsung 970 Pro for a recent occasion). Speed matters to some extent. Many users don't observe performance improvements in their typical tasks when upgrading from SATA SSD to M.2 PCI-E SSD, so they definitely wouldn't notice speed improvement upgrading from M.2 to Optane. And yet Optane's cost is not cheap.
I just don't see place for Optane in any user devices. It's either servers, but it's not obvious choice there or tiny market for benchmark users. May be someone like Apple with its vertical integration could exploit it extreme speed to achieve something awesome, but I doubt it, they don't like to depend on a single supplier.
>Optane in consumer devices is in a weird place. Write durability does not matter, SSD manufacturers reduce rewrite count with every new generation in the name of the cheaper prices and users are happy to accept that downgrade (see Samsung 980 Pro vs Samsung 970 Pro for a recent occasion).
The odd thing about rewrite count is that it shrinks very quickly the bigger your drive is. In the past you used to have a 128GB boot SSD and install a few games on it. This meant that you constantly deleted and reinstalled games on that low capacity SSD increasing the rewrite count.
Nowadays you can get 500GB SSDs for a decent price. If you can install every game then you might never have to rewrite data on it through uninstallation/installation. A lot of files are only written once and then never changed. With greater capacity you can have more "write once" files.
You the consumer might not feel the need to rewrite, but the drive itself has to do this periodically as a matter of internal Flash maintenance. Even Read Disturb (think ram RowHammer) is a thing for NAND. Then you have MLC/TLC technology in conjunction with modern small geometries leading to faster leakage (data persistence) and you end up with failures like Samsung 840 slowing down to a crawl, or older driver forgetting all data after being unplugged for a while, leading to Samsung 840 firmware update forcing the drive to rewrite itself periodically in the background. https://www.techspot.com/news/60362-samsung-fix-slow-840-evo...
> It was announced in July 2015 and is available on the open market under brand names Optane (Intel) and subsequently QuantX (Micron) since April 2017.
I think that's the entire point of this article: the existing system software APIs that we use aren't a good abstraction for the capabilities of the underlying hardware, leading to poor performance.
Single-thread, single-queue performance is much lower than the max with good NVMe devices.
With increased concurrency and deeper queues, my Samsung 960 Pro which has been running my Windows 10 desktop for several years still can do 294k random 4k reads IOPS, and 2.5GB/s sequential read.
Please may I pray your forgiveness first for my naivety and 2nd forgive please my disarray because I am keeping the first question unchanged because I think it's the way a lot of people will be thinking about Optane and I realised that this duality the memory and storage modes and it's not finished there either, needs far better marketing than I think Intel capable of.
I immediately assumed that you are running Optane DIMMS and enjoying life with great sequential speed and acceptably OK latency memory capacity of multiples of the normal RAM address space for your machines.
I forgot not only the fact that Optane M2 and AIC skus exist but in fact make incredible value improvement on smaller systems. It's up the desktop computational capacity scale where use cases aren't as elegant as the fairly easy to circumscribe NUC applications. (Least those I can imagine).
Second I forgot that Intel shipped the Scale MP authored RAM to block driver for Optane that let you tell your OS to treat storage attached Optane as RAM.
Because of unrelated factors the systems acquisition I was running in H218 is starting over now and as a consequence I never tested components not sure about relevance and 2nd order road map business effects. So since the only pixels I've read about the RAM to block driver option have been 9n the launch specifications and my 3 comments about this since I have no idea if you actually can use storage Optane as RAM.
(Dropping the semantics "storage class" and "memory class" would be my first edict at the helm of Intel strategy. I bet this nomenclature actually confuses the internal planning and delivery itself it's so insidiously confusing I could write one of those hideous corporate communications "style guide" about the possibilities for disaster this way )
Below is my original question I still would dearly appreciate learning your answer to. But I owe you a apology for doubting you in the original because I originally thought that Optane could my to.a lot of beating in a 1l chassis and less. Check out Patrick at Serve the Home for a super series of reviews of inexpensive and bargain performance mini NUC style desktops I'm sure you get no better than with a stick of Optane added.(To a PCIE riser adapter n.b. some of these tiny models give you bifurcation on their only pcie slot which could transform your use cases.
[Original below /
Intel "new unit of computing" skus have block storage drivers for Optane???
touisteur I must beg your indulgence my desire for knowledge! Can you possibly post a sky / model number of the most capable NUC you have working with Optane?
BTW you asked for sk-y- (sku?), I have a good bunch of NUC7i7BNHX1 and some i5 with similar Optane storage. Don't know whether they're byte addressable, I did talk about mmap and speed...
Also, if the speed and features are available as professional grade devices today, it will be available everywhere in a few years.