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Data Storage Intel Hardware Technology

Intel Launches Optane Memory That Makes Standard Hard Drives Perform Like SSDs (hothardware.com) 145

Posted by BeauHD from the old-is-new-again dept.
MojoKid writes: Intel has officially launched its Optane Memory line of Solid State Drives today, lifting embargo on performance benchmark results as well. Optane Memory is designed to accelerate the storage subsystem on compatible machines, to improve transfer speeds, and reduce latency. It is among the first products to leverage 3D XPoint memory technology that was co-developed by Intel and Micron, offering many of the same properties as NAND flash memory, but with higher endurance and certain performance characteristics that are similar to DRAM. The SSD can be paired to the boot drive in a system, regardless of the capacity or drive type, though Optane Memory will most commonly be linked to slower hard drives. Optane Memory is used as a high-speed repository, as usage patterns on the hard drive are monitored and the most frequently accessed bits of data are copied from the boot drive to the Optane SSD. Since the SSD is used as a cache, it is not presented to the end-user as a separate volume and works transparently in the background. Paired with an inexpensive SATA hard drive, general system performance is more in line with an NVMe SSD. In benchmark testing, Intel Optane Memory delivers a dramatic lift in overall system performance. Boot times, application load time, file searches, and overall system responsiveness are improved significantly. Setting up Intel Optane Memory is also quick and easy with "set it and forget it" type of solution. Optane Memory modules will hit retail this week in 16GB and 32GB capacities, at $44 and $77, respectively.
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Intel Launches Optane Memory That Makes Standard Hard Drives Perform Like SSDs More

Intel Launches Optane Memory That Makes Standard Hard Drives Perform Like SSDs

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  • Surprise, Hype! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Hybrid drive stuff has been around a while. It works OK up to a very limited point, then it performs like a regular drive. No voodoo magic is going to cache an entire multi-terabyte drive on a tiny expensive SSD. You might boot your OS quicker and have some limited applications perform well but it is strictly limited.

    The benefit this provides over the existing hybrid drives, where the flash is in the drive, is the cache is larger and faster, however still tiny compared to a standard modern big hard disk.

    • But caches work.

      Perhaps if you're editing video, you might need high-speed access to tens of gigabytes of data, but for everyone else, caching should do fine.

      A modern CPU without caches would be unthinkable. Why write them off for secondary storage?

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Because average throughput/performance matters very little when it's user-visible parts involved.
        An operation randomly taking either 10 or 30 seconds can to a user be MORE annoying than always taking 30 seconds, in which case your cache is negative value.
        There is also the point that for a lot of people there is the "cheap and fast" option as SSDs. For the price of a regular HDD and this one, many people could get a SSD that is large enough for their needs, giving them much better and especially vastly more

      • I think that you are underestimating the size of modern things like games while simultaneously not understanding that it is only the things that bottleneck the user that matter to users.

        The cache would need to be at least 70GB to hold a game like GTA 5.

        • It wouldn't be without use at all in that case. GTA 5 doesn't use all 70GB every time you play, so the assets you've been using lately will be cached.

    • Hybrid drive stuff has been around a while. It works OK up to a very limited point, then it performs like a regular drive. No voodoo magic is going to cache an entire multi-terabyte drive on a tiny expensive SSD. You might boot your OS quicker and have some limited applications perform well but it is strictly limited.

      Let me disable your CPU cache and see if you think it was useful or not. After all, a few megabytes of RAM can't cache all the gigabytes in the system, can it? It will be very limited, only a few limited applications will benefit.

      • You just described RAM. What's the point of persistent RAM when modern SSDs are as fast as Optane?

        If Optane was truly as fast as RAM but persistent they would be useful. Instead it's sometimes faster but often slower than an M2 SSD and offers very little to no benefit.

        • 3DXpoint is this gens NVRAM. In server testing its about 80% or better the performance. The issue with consumer optane is that they only used two (at most) 16GB ICs worth of it so the controller channels interleaving sucks. Its why the write speed of the Optane Memory module is only 300mb/s.

  • "Leverage" (Score:3, Funny)

    by cyber-vandal ( 148830 ) on Tuesday April 25, 2017 @06:10AM (#54296867) Homepage

    Or to the non-buzzword community "use".

  • Eh, Windows 10 only (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Who cares?

  • Fusion Drives... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Richard_at_work ( 517087 ) on Tuesday April 25, 2017 @06:16AM (#54296885)

    Yup, this is no different to "fusion drives" that have been on the market for years - a small SSD acting as a cache for a large spinning disk.

    What is different is that all Kaby Lake Intel chipsets come with support for setting this up in the bios, easily and quickly, so long as you are using an Optane PCIe stick as the cache device.

    Once the DIMM packaged versions become available, thats when Optane will really start to take off - slightly slower than DRAM, but not much, but considerably cheaper than DRAM for the same capacity - so you get slightly slower, much much cheaper RAM, meaning large RAM setups (like 1TB plus) are no longer out of many peoples budgets...

    • Aren't they called hybrid drives? (although they only are read cache)

      Fusion drive, at least in the OS X world, are tiered storage, where tier 1 are a PCI-E flash drive and tier 2 are SATA. Least used data are migrated to tier 2, data are written to tier 1(up to 4 GB on my machine) and then destaged to tier 2 after a while to make room for more writes.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by vyvepe ( 809573 )

      Once the DIMM packaged versions become available, thats when Optane will really start to take off - slightly slower than DRAM, but not much, but considerably cheaper than DRAM for the same capacity ...

      35 times bigger latencey of the current Optane memory when compared to DRAM is hardly "slightly" slower.
      Look at the latency comparison table in the middle of this article [theregister.co.uk].

  • Or you could just get an SSHD or use cheaper ways (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25, 2017 @06:31AM (#54296915)

    This isn't news, it's an advertising for Intel.

    There are already many ways to do this without using Intels expensive SSDs.

    For instance get an SSHD which basically does the same thing in hardware.

    Or use ZFS with the relevant ssd arc cache setup

    Or use one of many windows programs that do the same thing

    Or use the 10$ SSD/HD cards that are out there that do the same thing

    Or use a couple of the linux filesystem modules, that aren't as difficult as ZFS, that do the same thing

    Don't see why Intel get a headline for something that's been out for years in many different forms, to suit many different operating environments.

    • Could you go in to more detail regarding the "10$ SSD/HD cards" and "couple of linux filesystem modules"?
      They sound very interesting?

  • Unimpressive performance. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Tuesday April 25, 2017 @06:40AM (#54296935)

    Take a look at the ATTO Disk Benchmark graphs [hothardware.com] and you'll notice that optane comes in at dead last on both read and write performance. Sure, it'll beat Intel's SSD for the first few milliseconds but it gets absolutely destroyed by all the Samsung SSDs. Though, for all we know, the memory controller made the system retarded. Either way, it's not a winner.

    The upside of this is that I learned the Samsung SSD 960 Pro M.2 has excellent performance characteristics.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by GNious ( 953874 )

      Awesome - I can replace my 2TB spinning drive with a Samsung SSD of the same size for 77 USD?

      • Awesome - I can replace my 2TB spinning drive with a Samsung SSD of the same size for 77 USD?

        Who wrote or even implied that it would cost the same amount? Higher performance costs more regardless of the what you're buying.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by GNious ( 953874 )

          Because that's the proposition from Intel - a cheap way to speed things up. The very fact that a Samsung SSD 960 Pro M.2 exists is completely irrelevant for the given topic.

          A car analogy: Your post was basically, "why buy a engine upgrade for 77 USD, when new sports-cars exists"

          • It's a dumb product because who has a HDD in their Kaby Lake system?

          • You can buy a 128GB SSD for less than $77 (plus the cost of a new CPU and motherboard). Exactly what is Intel's value proposition?

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by epine ( 68316 )

              You can buy a 128GB SSD for less than $77 (plus the cost of a new CPU and motherboard). Exactly what is Intel's value proposition?

              Here, let me do your thinking for you.

              1 TB NAS drives are running about USD $65 at Newegg today. You'll want to run two in a mirror configuration. (This will double your pathetic read IOPs over a non-mirrored drive, and double your sequential read performance to 300 MB/s.)

              Both of those, plus the Optane SRT, works out to $207.

              A single Crucial MX300 1 TB M.2 will run you USD $28

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by aliquis ( 678370 )

        Awesome - I can replace my 2TB spinning drive with a Samsung SSD of the same size for 77 USD?

        You can likely get 64 GB of 960 Pro space for $77.

        Intel had HDD cache on SSD with previous motherboards and there's some software for doing it too though I don't know how well that one work.

        It definitely could be done with SSDs if they wanted too.

        However I think access-time is even lower on Optane than on the HDDs plus it will hold up to wear better.

    • Re:Unimpressive performance. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25, 2017 @06:54AM (#54296975)

      Take a look at the ATTO Disk Benchmark graphs [hothardware.com] and you'll notice that optane comes in at dead last on both read and write performance. Sure, it'll beat Intel's SSD for the first few milliseconds but it gets absolutely destroyed by all the Samsung SSDs. Though, for all we know, the memory controller made the system retarded. Either way, it's not a winner.

      The upside of this is that I learned the Samsung SSD 960 Pro M.2 has excellent performance characteristics.

      Even for Slashdot this is a stupid fucking comment.

      After reading the link ATTO Disk Benchmark graphs it says

      "Before we show you how Intel Optane Memory can accelerate a system, we’ve got some quick numbers recorded with the 32GB Optane Memory SSD operating as a separate standalone drive. This is NOT the Optane Memory SSD’s intended purpose. There are Intel Optane-branded consumer SSDs coming down the pipeline for standalone installations, but we know this is the first thing many of you would ask for, so here goes...
      Read more at http://hothardware.com/reviews/intel-optane-memory-with-3d-xpoint-review-and-performance?page=2#49c3kMRAJ3CCv3UA.99"

      So the article makes it clear this is not the intended purpose.

      And further down the same fucking article
      "CrystalDiskMark shows something else that’s very interesting. In the sequential tests, the Intel Optane Memory SSD -- AS EXPECTED -- trails the other high-end M.2 NVMe solid state drives. But these Optane Memory parts excel at small transfers, at low queue depths, which is where the vast majority of consumer workloads reside. In the 4K transfer test, the Optane Memory module absolutely obliterates everything else in the chart.
      Read more at http://hothardware.com/reviews/intel-optane-memory-with-3d-xpoint-review-and-performance?page=2#49c3kMRAJ3CCv3UA.99"

      Note the phrase "In the 4K transfer test, the Optane Memory module absolutely obliterates everything else in the chart."

      So the summary for the simple minded, thats you, is that it doesn't do very well for some things its not supposed to do and does do very well for those things its supposed to do well.

      Twat!

    • Re:Unimpressive performance. (Score:4, Informative)

      by edxwelch ( 600979 ) on Tuesday April 25, 2017 @07:41AM (#54297089)

      I prefer the Ars technica article: https://arstechnica.com/gadget... [arstechnica.com]
      Gives a much more critical look at the product. The other reviews seem to be fawning over the new tech too much without doing proper real world comparisons

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )

      Scroll down to the CrystalDiskMark 4K test, it kills the 960 Pro with 307 MB/s compared to 62 MB/s read performance. Big transfers or deep queues? SSD better. Short burst of performance at low queue depths? Super quick. Write speed is not super impressive but assuming the primary goal is to read from slow storage and cache it's good enough. The downside with this and all hybrid systems is of course that it's not consistent. Scan through a big folder of 20MP+ photos, what happens to your application cache? Q

      • Scan through a big folder of 20MP+ photos, what happens to your application cache? Quite possibly evicted.

        Intel is probably smart enough to use a hybrid MFU technique rather than MRU. They might set aside a portion or percentage for MRU to speed up ongoing operations, but I don't think they're dumb enough to run the whole cache on that basis.

      • In just about any machine, you'd probably be better off with an SSD. Even in a cheap laptop, you're better off just getting an SSD and if you really need the extra space, just hook up an external drive over USB. SSDs are so much faster than any other option that trying to still use HDDs as they are cheap per gigabyte just doesn't make sense in the vast majority of cases.

    • You're comparing a 32GB module with a 1TB module. Think about 30 of those optane modules in RAID0. That's basically what they do with SSD modules at higher storage sizes, so you're just giving the Samsung SSD the RAID0 benefit. Granted the optane technology is more expensive, but it *is* faster.
  • Hanging out for a variant that moves from the HD to the SSD to avoid virus scans, and back. I'm not really hanging out for it, but I expect it, because if it's even remotely possible, some twit will do it.

  • Only Kaby Lake needs to apply (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Perhaps should mention that this overpriced, not-that-impressive cache solution is only compatible with the very latest Kaby Lake systems.

    So unless you replaced your PC in the past couple of months, this product is not compatible. Not that I'd recommend anyone to touch it with a ten foot pole anyway, with perhaps an exception for very specific professional applications.

  • Not living to the promise (Score:5, Informative)

    by esperto ( 3521901 ) on Tuesday April 25, 2017 @07:05AM (#54297005)
    When intel announced 3DXpoint a couple of years ago they said it would be the best thing since sliced bread, cheap as flash, 1000x time more durable, 100x faster, 1000x lower latency. They also promised it in a form factor to replace RAM, kinda like HP "the machine" M-RAM.

    But now we see it is not all that, latency is really good but the endurance is barely over flash, so bad that for enterprise product they had to actually use several times the apparent capacity, otherwise it would die really fast due to wear, and for the general consumer the only product they could come up with was an expensive hard drive accelerator, which sincerely, nobody in their right mind should buy, there are already hybrid HD out there with integrated flash that do the same and do not depend on the motherboard chipset/BIOS to operate, and if you are cheap enough to not by a small (and yet much bigger) SSD for your OS for almost the same price, you are not going to buy this.

    Hope they some day can live up to the initial hype, but this is not looking to good.

  • Hyrbid? What's Intel's production problem? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by swb ( 14022 ) on Tuesday April 25, 2017 @07:15AM (#54297015)

    32 GB of Optane for $77 is $2.40 per GB, Samsung 850 Pro 1 TB is $0.50 per GB. Intel is nearly 5x more expensive.

    Hybrid storage systems are common in the enterprise SAN market, but generally to be useful they need something like 20% of capacity to be flash. At ratios of 1-3% of HDD capacity, I don't see the Intel use case as being especially useful.

    I had a Seagate 2.5" years ago that was 32 GB flash plus 512GB and it only felt marginally faster than a standard disk drive. You didn't notice serious performance boosts until you went completely flash.

    So does Intel have a yield problem or are they still ramping up production facilities to make these in quantity? It's hard to see a system more convoluted than straight SATA or NVMe flash disk being that big of a deal. I think in order to make this product competitive it has to be offered at $/GB competitive with ordinary flash disks or only a small premium.

    • I think Intel either has a yield problem, or simply that X-Point is a lot more expensive to manufacture than they pretend. NAND and DRAM have very mature manufacturing processes that are hard to beat in cost.
      I think in fact that it costs a lot more than $77 to manufacture, that's why they enforce all these artificial restrictions (only Kaby lake only 200 series motherboards) - because they are selling below cost and don't want to hurt their margins too much.

  • What's the difference between this and the Fusion Drive Apple's been shipping for, like, 5 or 6 years?

  • you can get real PCI-E SSD for about $1/gig or less and you don't have to deal with any of the fake raid bs.

    • you can get real PCI-E SSD for about $1/gig or less and you don't have to deal with any of the fake raid bs.

      How do you define "real PCI-E SSD"? Would you include a $9,000 enterprise-grade PCI-E SSD from Intel with up to 850,000 IOPS 4K random reads?

      Intel DC P3608 [newegg.com]

      Guess what? It consists of two SSD's that are configured as RAID0 by Intel's RSTe driver software.

  • Non "standard" memory won't make me switch from my SSD back to a mechanical one. I'm not into speed like I was in the late 80's through late 90's. With the SSD, photoshop boots in about 10 seconds, fast enough for me.

  • Now that 3D-xpoint is finally available, does anyone have hard numbers for it's read life (how many times it can be read) and/or shelf life (how long it will last without being turned on)?

  • This is just like those bite-sized freebies in your local grocery store. By themselves, for practical use these drives make little practical sense. Review sites shouldn't have bothered with that Intel's cache bullshit. Instead just treat them as teeny tiny SSD drives serving as a technology preview.

    Bottom line - latency on these things is awesome. Write granularity is good too - will be awesome with proper abstraction level in OS. Write endurance - we don't know - waiting for somebody to write the shit ou

  • God, marketers are a plague. It's a cache, just call it that.

  • Unless there is a pretty good reason to still use a HDD, why not just get an SSD? Would take up less space than a HDD and one of these things.
  • I just wanted to remind everyone that hybrid drives with flash memory mini-SSDs have always been inconsistent, overpriced, underperforming crap ever since they were invented. My company has tested dozens of them and they're all completely unpredictable. Also a 16GB buffer? Great, my game's sound and data files are 19GB. It's just not practical and the firmware isn't nearly smart enough nor are they big enough. A 64GB one could just barely get by on loading common operating instructions but that's not how
  • It looks to me like Intel/Micron wants to get their new product in the hands of early adopters first instead of trying to appeal to the mass market off the bat. This technology is radically different than what we are used to. They are looking for people who see the vision of what they are trying to accomplish and are willing to throw time, effort, and money at moving that technology forward. People who buy this first product are not the ones who think 'I am only interested if this is much better, cheaper, a
  • So pair a $55 2Tb HDD with $77 32GB Optane drive = effectively a $132 2Tb HDD w/ near SSD access speeds?

    SSD street prices for 1TB SSDs are about $300.

    Sounds like a deal to me.

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