You likely already noticed this in the press-release from ASUS. Intel is releasing cache modules based on 3D Xpoint technology. There will be a 16GB and 32GB version. The idea is that you speedup perf... Intel Launches Optane Cache modules for Desktops
OMG, Intel, how could you turn such a great technology into such a crap device???? As many of us had the feeling - in 2017 there's just no place for it. Can you just sort out your manufacturing issues and release a proper SSD based on Optane tech? (with some sane price along the way) I am totally disappointed.
This is beyond ridiculous. I bet those numbers aren't even compared to a SATA SSD, let alone an NVMe SSD. Not that it really matters since after the OS, how much stuff are you going to store on a 16 or 32GB unit anyway? Maybe it's great if you only ever do 2 things with your PC. I'd rather install a 500GB NVMe SSD if I had a 270 series mobo. LOLPTANE.
looks like half-baked junk, will probably see adoption in the system integrator type market as an 'amazing feature', faster than SSD speeds, etc...but nobody in their right mind will be using this in a self build, just use an SSD already. Would be ideal in a 7350K based system in a 'I spent loads of money but have nothing to show for it' sense.
I don't get the hate here, other then people once again not being able to see beyond their own use case. It's a low cost cache that's supposed to slot under SSD based OEM systems.
As someone who normally doesn't like Intel, I actually think this product is a decent idea (particularly in Windows). There are people out there who have multiple terabytes worth of applications and game data. If you need at least 2TB of storage, I am pretty confident a HDD + Optane would be a much cheaper option than a 2TB SSD, while offering similar performance. It wouldn't surprise me if you could actually get 2x 2TB HDDs and put them in RAID1, and still pay less. Doing so would improve performance while keeping data redundant. I would have to say that Optane is a pretty stupid choice is you're going for less than 1TB of storage. I also think Optane could be especially handy if you could reserve it for a paging file, and, Windows' prefetch/superfetch. Even Windows 10 will still use a paging file despite available un-buffered memory, and will close applications saying you've run out of virtual memory even though you have plenty of physical memory left over. I personally don't like the idea of wearing out an SSD because Windows does such a crappy job at knowing what resources it has available to it, but I dislike the idea more of applications failing to run properly, and I dislike even more the idea of putting in a HDD to use as a dedicated swap partition. This is where I think Optane comes in handy - if you can designate your paging file to it, then you can effectively buy less RAM and then buy an Optane drive (which in comparison to RAM is priced pretty well). That way, you still get pretty close to RAM performance while getting Windows' paging issues out of the way, all while keeping your SSD fresh.
From what i can tell this seems to be a cheap alternative for people still stuck using HDD's as their main drive, anyone using SSD or NVME drives will find almost no use for these. Although SSD prices have dropped they are still fairly high for the main stream consumer, much cheaper to buy a TB HDD + optane than it would to get an SSD.
