Intel has been hard at work with anything Optane in the form of storage units and cache drives. A long time ago Intel already indicated Optane memory, well they have now shown modules based on 3D XPo... Intel Shows Optane memory that fits in DDR4 DIMM slots
They're still trying to push this thing down people's throats? "This is Optane and you WILL like it."
This is the type of Optane that everyone wanted to start with. I think people underestimate what a game changer replacing your RAM with non-volatile memory could be. In the future, it could mean the end of ever seeing a loading screen again. Imagine wanting to run a game and bam, it's already in memory so no need to load it. Instantly responsive PCs.
I'd looked into their Optane 900p 480GB for my upgrade build I am putting together atm, totally not worth it to me, went with a 960 1TB EVO instead (paid £255 / $340 for an oem model) But saw a video bt Star Citixen's Devs where they had been using an SSD RAID 6 with 24 SSDs to complie their builds, swapping to a VROC RAID with 4x 900p reduced their build time in half! From 6hrs13mins to 3hrs30mins. In the right scenario's these drives have amazing performance which works out a LOT cheaper that regular solutions!
Their setup was using 850 EVO 1TB drives for their RAID 6 setup. I imagine the boost in performance is a combo of the Virtual Raid On CPU combined with Optane's abilities.
Well if my understanding of RAID 6 is still valid. Total Performance = 1885.71 MB/s Total usable capacity = 10.00 TB RAID Type: RAID 6 (Stripe set with double parity) Reads 50%, Writes 50% Number of RAID groups = 1 Number of drives per RAID group = 12 Single RAID group performance = 1885.71 MB/s So, not to be rude, but i am not that impressed by your example, if you use 4 x NVME and e.g an X399 or intel equivalent motherboard, you can pretty much beat that with samsung pro 860's 2tb var, and here i put in the setup as a Raid 5, while you didn't specify what raid setup they used in the example with star citizen. I don't know if intel VROC supports Raid 6, but their Raid 5 variant with write hole fix is pretty nefty. Total Performance = 5760 MB/s Total usable capacity = 6.00 TB RAID Type: RAID 5 (Stripe set with parity) Reads 50%, Writes 50% Number of RAID groups = 1 Number of drives per RAID group = 4 Total number of drives = 4 Single RAID group performance = 5760 MB/s Kind regards. Brut.
People make such crazy SSD RAID setups for performance when dealing with various scenarios, if they scaled as miserably as 12 SSDs = 1885.71 MB/s, then they would not bother to use such solutions where speed is the key factor. I am fixing a PC with an unusual issue right now and it's taking more time than I hoped, but after I will dig up an example setup/build I have seen in the past similar to Star Citizen's one.
Optane might have success in server platform market, in customer market it will most likely die like other revolutionary tech -> rambus. Anyway that radiator on photo looks very cheap.