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The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X (375GB) Review: Testing 3D XPoint Performance

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Re: The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X (375GB) Review: Testing 3D XPoint Performance

#31

Post by blacksmith_tb »

agumonkey wrote: post #26
mtanski wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It lives on in the save icon. But in all seriousness you're right, floppy as a medium for data storage is dead. Unless you're the US gov. According to Wikipedia: "In May 2016 the United States Government Accountability Office released a report that covered the need to upgrade or replace legacy computer systems within Federal Agencies. According to this document, old IBM Series/1 minicomputers running on 8-inch floppy…

Optical discs are relegated to back shelves too. Hard to beat cheap rewritable nand flash. ps: I'd be curious about a tiny, 2017 laptop friendly optical disc storage. Say a 2.5" RW BD layer in cartridge. A modern mini disc.

I doubt anything could be compact enough to be laptop friendly in the sense of being a physical part of the machine - but external USB 3 BD burners are quite small (powered over usb, too), I have a Samsung which works fine.

Re: The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X (375GB) Review: Testing 3D XPoint Performance

#32

Post by kabdib »

klodolph wrote: post #30
kabdib wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... and magnetic bubble memory, which is a very odd hybrid somewhere between tape and delay lines. Also, phase-change optical (as in rewritable CDs/DVDs). Also also, printing stuff out at high bit-density with good ECC, and scanning it back in again. Also also also, chemically encoded bits (as in the DNA-based storage that was demonstrated recently). There are more, not in common use or very scalable (e.g., mechanica…

I think it's a bit conspicuous how you mention good ECC for printing stuff out, since good ECC is a staple of many forms of storage (especially hard drives, optical drives, tape) and we don't mention e.g. "storing bits on spinning rust with good ECC and reading it back in again". I think the problem with paper is thot it's not really part of the computer any more. You need a human to take the paper out of the printer…

I hadn't thought of that. Your average "crappy thumb drive" probably has more ECC than you'd need on a physical piece of paper. You're right.

Re: The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X (375GB) Review: Testing 3D XPoint Performance

#33

Post by bkeroack »

chx wrote: post #11
dboreham wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has always been the case that owned metal is much cheaper than cloud. Cloud wins for things like very small machines (you can't buy 20% of a metal box); temporary deployments; and startups where the investors don't want to be on the hook for big $$ capex that they end up needing to shift on eBay post flame-out. Also where you just don't have the ability to run hardware (increasingly the case) and where for whateve…

I never understood this. Just rent a dedicated box or ten. There's no capex, it's way cheaper to have 3-5 times the capability you will need just sitting there instead of renting stuff from Amazon with all the I/O unpredictability, complexity, w/e. People talk as if colo and cloud is the only solution -- and I am like, rent dedicated is the only solution. I do not readily know how huge your site needs to be for colo…

With public cloud, you're paying for the control plane. Period.

Yes the raw compute cost is much higher (and the performance often less) than bare metal, but software development is really, really expensive. With the public cloud you get the result of literally millions of programmer-hours "for free". To many that's worth it (at least at first, below a certain scale).

This is also one reason why Kubernetes is really exciting, BTW. It's a control plane that you don't have to rent.

Re: The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X (375GB) Review: Testing 3D XPoint Performance

#35

Post by chx »

bkeroack wrote: post #33
chx wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood this. Just rent a dedicated box or ten. There's no capex, it's way cheaper to have 3-5 times the capability you will need just sitting there instead of renting stuff from Amazon with all the I/O unpredictability, complexity, w/e. People talk as if colo and cloud is the only solution -- and I am like, rent dedicated is the only solution. I do not readily know how huge your site needs to be for colo…

With public cloud, you're paying for the control plane. Period. Yes the raw compute cost is much higher (and the performance often less) than bare metal, but software development is really, really expensive. With the public cloud you get the result of literally millions of programmer-hours "for free". To many that's worth it (at least at first, below a certain scale). This is also one reason why Kubernetes is really…

I really badly do not understand what EC2 gives you that a dedicated box doesn't. Yes, if you use all the other services, then there's a value but then again for example SQS is a particularly shitty queue.

Re: The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X (375GB) Review: Testing 3D XPoint Performance

#36

Post by chx »

cookiecaper wrote: post #15
chx wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood this. Just rent a dedicated box or ten. There's no capex, it's way cheaper to have 3-5 times the capability you will need just sitting there instead of renting stuff from Amazon with all the I/O unpredictability, complexity, w/e. People talk as if colo and cloud is the only solution -- and I am like, rent dedicated is the only solution. I do not readily know how huge your site needs to be for colo…

Renting a dedicated box doesn't have that cool "we can scale INFINITELY!" vibe. ;)

YAGNI.

Re: The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X (375GB) Review: Testing 3D XPoint Performance

#38

Post by Crespyl »

frozenport wrote: post #27

At $5 per gb, I would instead buy RAM. Edit: why the downvotes? I'm currently doing image processing and using a ram drive with ~200GBs.

The reason you would use this over RAM is persistence, it doesn't need to stay powered to keep the data.

If all you need is a massive amount of temporary storage for some algorithm, you'll still need RAM, but if you want a stupidly fast backing store for a huge amount of source and then output data, this is pretty incredible.

Re: The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X (375GB) Review: Testing 3D XPoint Performance

#39

Post by [deleted] »

chx wrote: post #11
dboreham wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has always been the case that owned metal is much cheaper than cloud. Cloud wins for things like very small machines (you can't buy 20% of a metal box); temporary deployments; and startups where the investors don't want to be on the hook for big $$ capex that they end up needing to shift on eBay post flame-out. Also where you just don't have the ability to run hardware (increasingly the case) and where for whateve…

I never understood this. Just rent a dedicated box or ten. There's no capex, it's way cheaper to have 3-5 times the capability you will need just sitting there instead of renting stuff from Amazon with all the I/O unpredictability, complexity, w/e. People talk as if colo and cloud is the only solution -- and I am like, rent dedicated is the only solution. I do not readily know how huge your site needs to be for colo…

[deleted]

Re: The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X (375GB) Review: Testing 3D XPoint Performance

#40

Post by pinewurst »

klodolph wrote: post #23
bbulkow wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are only 3 forms of bit storage, historically. 1) Poking holes in things ( tape, DVD, etc ) 2) Magnets ( core memory, drum memory, tape, disks ) 3) Circuits ( DRAM, NAND, etc ) Examples of all three of these still exist. What's interesting about XPoint is it is literally a fourth form that has never been commercially available: melting a substance and cooling it quickly or slowly, forming either a crystal or am…

There are only 3 forms that really survive to this day. There are a couple of notable obsolete ones: 4) Delay lines. I would definitely not categorize these as circuits. The bits are stored as pressure waves in motion. 5) Electrostatic charge. Talking about the Williams tube. The bits are stored as residual charge on a phosphor surface.

Is #5 that much different from dynamic RAM, with bits stored as capacitive charge?
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