Terrific for a hobby project, build farm, or even a business in a prototype stage (buy 3-4 then).
Hardly acceptable in a larger setting where continuity in 10 years is important. Of course, not the exact same part available in 10 years (which is not unheard of, though), but something compatible or at least comparable.
If you have a scenario where Optane makes sense today, in 10 years it'll be cost effective to use at least that much DRAM, backed by whatever storage is mainstream then and whatever capacitors or batteries you need to safely flush that DRAM to storage.
A dead-end product on clearance sale isn't the right choice for projects where you need to keep a specific mission-critical machine running for a decade straight. But for a lot of projects, all that really matters is that in a few years you can set up a new system with equal or better performance characteristics and not need to re-write your application to work well on the new hardware. I think all of the (vanishingly few) scenarios where Optane NVMe SSDs make sense fall into the latter category. (I feel sorry for anyone who invested significant effort into writing software to use Optane DIMMs.)
I’ve often wondered when the DRAM-backed storage revolution was going arrive.
Not long ago, 64GB SSDs were the bare minimum you could get away with, and only the most expensive setups had 64GB RAM. Now we’re seeing 64GB modules for consumer laptops priced reason cheap.
I wonder: if RAM prices head towards $0.05/GB (around $50 for the cheapest 1TB) that we’re currently seeing for SSDs, would that allow the dream of a legitimately useful RAM disk to become a reality?
> I wonder: if RAM prices head towards $0.05/GB (around $50 for the cheapest 1TB) that we’re currently seeing for SSDs, would that allow the dream of a legitimately useful RAM disk to become a reality?
Become? I strongly doubt it.
You can make a great RAM disk today, but if you don't find that useful enough then the future isn't going to make it much better.
In that future, you don't need a RAM disk for your 800GB compile folders to live in cache or for your zero-loading-screen games to stream data at 50GB/s off your PCIe 7.0 drive.
Terrific for a hobby project, build farm, or even a business in a prototype stage (buy 3-4 then).
Hardly acceptable in a larger setting where continuity in 10 years is important. Of course, not the exact same part available in 10 years (which is not unheard of, though), but something compatible or at least comparable.