An Intel slide leaked onto the web displaying a consumer version 900P Optane SSD, it is called the Intel 900P and will be available in four models.... Intel Working On 900P Consumer Optane SSD with High Volume Capacity
The only thing that can make this attractive is an insanely low price. But knowing Intel and the "nature" of this SSD - it won't be the case. So I can't see how it can be popular with anyone.
Well, considering it is likely to be real world 8-10x faster than any other ssd on the market, low price could probably be the least of a reason to buy. Still, hope it meets expectations.
Are the chips still so large and low density they can't fit an actually usable size in the M.2 format? Now we only got those 16/32GB joke drives as M.2. These new ones seem to be plain PCIe slot behemoths and U.2 drives.
And how can it be 8-10x faster than already faster SSDs? Or do you want to say that somehow today's SSDs doesn't have real world performance?
Not really - Optane memory is likely to perform much worse than "normal" SSDs. http://semiaccurate.com/2017/03/27/intel-crosses-unacceptable-ethical-line/
Their 8x 10x faster claim is in comparison to their own ssd dc p3700 "low que depth performance" which is very misleading. People who glance over their claims extrapolate that into 8x 10x faster than other ssd's which isn't the case.https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/IntelR-OptaneTM-Technology-Workshop-Analyst-and-Press-Slides-3-15..._Page_09.png The 375gb pcie card goes for $1500. Not exactly in the realm of the average desktop user's price range but they are offering it in small chunks if you will at low pricing as a cache memory to speed up your current ssd. But you have to already have an optane ready mobo.https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/03/intels-first-optane-ssd-for-regular-pcs-is-a-small-but-has-super-fast-cache/
from the looks of it its IOPS are better than samsungs pro M.2 drives, by over 100k for both reads and writes, but it uses 2-4 times more power, write speeds are almost the same but read speeds are only 2/3 the speed of samsungs pro m.2 drives. I wouldn't exactly call it a failure, it does some things better, and its not THAT far behind in the things it does worse (except for power usage that's pretty bad), i guess it all just comes down to price, if its waaaaaay more expensive then its not really gonna be worth it unless it somehow ends up having some real world advantage over other drive types and if it does, that advantage is probably going to be pretty specific and probably wont affect normal SSD users.
What we have seen now is from that hdd cache. As for the speed - current flash memory based SSDs are good only on sequential read, because they "see" the request and read ahead, taking the data from many flash banks at once and write (because they cache the data and write simultaneous). Sadly, "desktop" usage is QD=1, random read, i.e. you are reading one block, but the next one is in some totally different space and cannot be predicted. In this case even best consumer SSDs (Samsung 960 pro for example) are barely able to get into 65mb/s, the more widespread ones hovering between 40-55. Optane is random access on bit level, there are no blocks involved, in theory it might be slower than SSDs on max sequential speed, but should give considerable advantage with random access. Keyword here is should, even if they don't go that high, but provide something like 200mb/s on RR, this is already 4 times real world scenario and will be very happy about it.
Not to mention you need a new Kabylake processor and motherboard/chipset to use Optane so it is only benefiting people buying a new computer who would already be getting better performance because, they are buying a new computer.
Is that just for the caching solution, hopefully? I'm interested in the 900p as a full-on boot/OS drive. But, I have x99, so am I out of luck?
I don't actually understand why they couldn't make an SSD using this technology that would be competible with any system capable of running NVMe SSDs. Maybe if Intel actually is saving some money by having the CPU perform an operation that is normally handled by the SSD itself in the traditional NAND ones. Thus, only Kaby Lake might have whatever extra functionality is indeed and Intel would make that much more extra profit.
