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Intel Optane

Concluding week, Intel announced its new Optane drives meant for server and HPC configurations. Today, the company is announcing its PC customer version. The new drives will ship in 16GB and 32GB capacities. They're mostly intended to serve as enshroud drives for mechanical hard disks, as opposed to being primary storage for an OS or games.

Optane-Positioning

Optane's usefulness in target markets.

Intel is making some impressive claims nigh Optane'southward ability to accelerate performance in desktop workloads for all types of users. Merely information technology's not clear how much Optane'southward performance really differs from an SSD cache bulldoze.

It's been a few years since nosotros wrote about enshroud drives, but you lot ofttimes run across these configurations in midrange laptops to boost performance without costing the OEM very much costing consumers more money. An SSD cache bulldoze is designed to cache the most normally accessed data based on its analysis of the most mutual drive workloads and capabilities. Dorsum in 2012, we did a comparison of Intel's SRT cache plan versus Nvelo's caching architecture. The slideshow below captures some of our results in that test. Again, these slides are only comparable in the broadest sense. Click on each slide to open it in a new window.

Our benchmarks show that the biggest gains in performance with an SSD cache drive, at least back and so, came from pairing a slower mechanical Caviar Black with an SSD. The hard drive Intel is using is a Western Digital Caviar Blackness WD1003FZEX, the hard drive we tested 4.5 years ago was a Caviar Black WD1001FALS. All else being equal, we'd expect the WD1003FZEX to exist slightly faster, since it offers more than cache (64MB vs 32MB) and support for SATA 6G as opposed to SATA II.

Optane-3

Intel's Optane will offer impressive performance acceleration if the company's metrics are accurate.

One thing I desire to make extremely clear is that I'm non challenge that an Optane enshroud drive offers no benefits over and to a higher place an SSD cache drive. Eyeballing the numbers, it looks as though the Optane Yard.ii is faster than an SSD cache relative to baseline performance. The but point I'm making is that SSD enshroud drives take been offer substantial improvements over and above mechanical hard drives for years, and information technology's non yet clear how much Optane improves operation compared with this alternative. Its low-level metrics are substantially faster than any SSD cache drive, as is its endurance. It's also possible that Intel's baseline measurements are higher, meaning the Optane drive would notwithstanding be faster than an SSD enshroud at the same percentage performance improvement.

These new Optane drives are keyed to support M.two type B and Grand.2 type Thousand, simply only utilize two PCI-Express lanes and will non function in a motherboard that only offers SATA connectivity through the M.ii slot. Users should as well keep in mind that Optane is just compatible with Intel's 200-series chipsets. Both the 16GB and 32GB drives can be pre-ordered immediately, for $44 and $77 respectively. That's non immediately a great deal, given that 128GB and 256GB SSDs are available at those toll points, but we'll have to compare Optane'south performance earlier nosotros can say how much these drives improve over mechanical-only results.

Now read: How practice SSDs work?