Rest in Peace, Optane
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Rest in Peace, Optane
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Re: Rest in Peace, Optane
#2My HP laptop came with optane memory, as far as I could tell, it was nothing special.
I eventually pulled it to upgrade to a Terabyte ssd
Re: Rest in Peace, Optane
#3My HP laptop came with optane memory, as far as I could tell, it was nothing special. I eventually pulled it to upgrade to a Terabyte ssd
That was probably a hybrid optane setup, like the h10 ssd. It was a tiny optane ssd and a normal ssd on the same m.2 card. Not very good compared to real optane. A really noticeable improvement when running apt, or dnf, or any windows program install.
Re: Rest in Peace, Optane
#4Optane SSDs are really special and still have a place. SLC is 30 microseconds at best, FIO puts my 905p optane drive at 5-11 microseconds. That means for a single threaded latency bound task, a 905p may finish it 6 times faster than an SLC ssd. 20 times faster than MLC!
Edit - wrong prefix sorry!
Re: Rest in Peace, Optane
#5My HP laptop came with optane memory, as far as I could tell, it was nothing special. I eventually pulled it to upgrade to a Terabyte ssd
In the use case they were pushing for consumers, accelerating a hard drive, it was pretty much indistinguishable from cheap flash.
Optane had great potential for big databases, but you're not running a big database.
It also had very interesting potential for supplementing memory, as a very low latency place to store bulk data. But then the Optane DIMMs ended up being just as expensive if not more expensive than actual RAM. So outside of certain niches, especially because of how narrow the compatibility was, just spend the money on more RAM.
Re: Rest in Peace, Optane
#6What was interesting about Optane was that it was kinda an attempt to get rid of disk and ram distinction.
You had single device (optane stick) which served as both - ram and disk.
After decades of current approach we finally could physically get rid of disks - hdds, ssds or even nvme sticks.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/01/optane_intel_cancella...
>Optane presented a radical, transformative technology but because of this legacy view, this technical debt, few in the industry realized just how radical Optane was. And so it bombed.
Re: Rest in Peace, Optane
#7What was interesting about Optane was that it was kinda an attempt to get rid of disk and ram distinction. You had single device (optane stick) which served as both - ram and disk. After decades of current approach we finally could physically get rid of disks - hdds, ssds or even nvme sticks. https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/01/optane_intel_cancella... >Optane presented a radical, transformative technology but bec…
Still waiting for the Memristor...
Re: Rest in Peace, Optane
#8Optane is dead. Long live Optane!
PCIE 3.0 Optane recently sold so well it got backordered and the price popped. (Ok maybe it was LevelOneTechs Wendell? Maybe it was organic? https://www.newegg.com/intel-optane-905p-1-5tb/p/N82E1682016... ) Today PCIE 4.0 prices have fallen so fast that you can RAID0 a few M.2s and get about the same IOPs from a single Optane drive for a similar $ per GB, though not exactly the same durability / DWPD. Chia is no longer a driving force for drive durability, but then again Optane was designed for databases / SAN and not proof-of-space (e.g. PNY https://www.pny.com/lx3030-m2-nvme-ssd ).
Optane as a consumer product might have been a good play when laptops mostly had spinning disks, but market timing was too late. Today those consumer Optane drives were, yeah, a mistake, but a cool part for a homelab.
Optane as an enterprise / workstation product though is king for: * databases / ml datasets that don't fit in memory * large SANs that host critical VM persistent storage
It's a small niche but when IOPS and durability matter, there's nothing close. However if Optane really ends at PCIE 4.0, then top-tier PCIE 5.0 nvme will probably meet or beat Optane in 2024.
Re: Rest in Peace, Optane
#9Optane SSDs are really special and still have a place. SLC is 30 microseconds at best, FIO puts my 905p optane drive at 5-11 microseconds. That means for a single threaded latency bound task, a 905p may finish it 6 times faster than an SLC ssd. 20 times faster than MLC! Edit - wrong prefix sorry!
Maybe your fio is hitting RAM? fio for 905p / p5800x is usually low micros. Order of magnitude faster than other nvme but not as fast as RAM.
Re: Rest in Peace, Optane
#10The low latencies at lower queue depths made it great for write cache devices(SLOG) for ZFS. It was the perfect match for that purpose.
If I had a database that is smaller than 400GiB in size, I could have made it screaming fast while being safe with an Optane drive.
Indeed one of a kind technology.