Intel Introduces New High Speed Optane Drives
-
The new Optane drive technology is expected to arrive next year. Well worth taking a look at.
-
How would these improve gaming, I wonder? Already games can load completely into system memory and don't bother because it is unnecessary given the incredible speed of existing SSDs. I don't see laptops and gaming systems having any significant benefit from this. In the consumer space we are only just beginning to get the hang of leveraging SSDs and they are so fast that we generally see them as instant. if the price different is trivial, Optane sounds great. But at the consumer level, it would need to be price parity before I was going to use it there.
-
I see the use case for these in databases and almost solely there (until they get cheap.) We would need to know a lot about their performance, longevity, reliability, durability, cost, etc. before we could speculate much. Seven times faster is a big deal, that means that things like FusionIO are going to have to rethink what they are doing. And the SATA and SAS bottlenecks would be useless and we'd be forced onto direct PCIe or faster for any hope of getting the speed out of these things. But changes there have been coming regardless because already are drives are bottlenecked by the connection technologies.
If these end up the same price as current flash SSDs but are seven times faster and all other things are equal, that's amazing and we will switch right over and the flash drive is dead. But I suspect that there are many factors that we have yet to discover. And, right now, it's just a long off dream. We will have to see if they really bring these to market.
By and large, though, systems like file servers and application servers are no longer bottlenecked at the datastore layer but on the network, so I would not see most workloads having a reason to upgrade, yet.
