I use two Intel 905 SSDs as mirrored cache devices for ZFS.
What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)
121–130 of 164 posts
Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)
#122It stands out, because it didn't sell. Which is weird because there were some pretty big pros about using them. The latency for updating 1 byte was crazy good. Some databases or journals for something like zfs really benefited from this.
In "databases and journals" you rarely update just one byte, you do a transaction that updates data, several indexes and metadata. All of that needs to be atomic. Power failure can happen in between any of "1 byte updates with crazy latencies." However small latency is, power failure is still faster. Usually, there is a write ahead or some other log that alleviates the problem, this log is usually written in streamin…
> However small latency is, power failure is still faster.
A fancy switching power supply with a friendly power factor (looks like a resistive load, rather than drawing more amps during the lower voltage parts of the waveform) actually will have non-zero fall time when suddenly unplugged.
Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cost was fantastically cheap, if you take into account that Optane is going to live >>10x longer than a SSD. For a lot of bulk storage, yes, you don't have frequently changing data. But for databases or caches, that are under heavy load, optane was not only far faster, but if looking at life-cycle costs, way way less.
Optane was in the market during a time when the mainstream trend in the SSD industry was all about sacrificing endurance to get higher capacity. It's been several years, and I'm not seeing a lot of regrets from folks who moved to TLC and QLC NAND, and those products are more popular than ever. The niche that could actually make use of Optane's endurance was small and shrinking, and Intel had no roadmap to significant…
> I'm not seeing a lot of regrets from folks who moved to TLC and QLC NAND, and those products are more popular than ever.
That's interesting. Even TLC has huge limitations, but QLC is basically useless unless you use it as write-once-read-many memory.
I wish I have bought a lot of SSDs when you could still buy MLC ones.
Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)
#124Surprised Optane wasn't kept on life support by hyperscalers and kicked in to overdrive as the demand for AI memory spiked.
The fab was already taken apart and sold by then.
Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Optane was in the market during a time when the mainstream trend in the SSD industry was all about sacrificing endurance to get higher capacity. It's been several years, and I'm not seeing a lot of regrets from folks who moved to TLC and QLC NAND, and those products are more popular than ever. The niche that could actually make use of Optane's endurance was small and shrinking, and Intel had no roadmap to significant…
> I'm not seeing a lot of regrets from folks who moved to TLC and QLC NAND, and those products are more popular than ever. That's interesting. Even TLC has huge limitations, but QLC is basically useless unless you use it as write-once-read-many memory. I wish I have bought a lot of SSDs when you could still buy MLC ones.
> QLC is basically useless unless you use it as write-once-read-many memory
The market thoroughly disagrees with your stupid exaggeration. QLC is a high-volume mainstream product. It's popular in low-end consumer SSDs, where the main problem is not endurance but sustained performance (especially writing to a mostly-full drive). A Windows PC is hardly a WORM workload.
Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Write endurance of the drive would be measured in TBW, and TLC flash kept adding enough 3D layers to stay cheap enough, quickly enough, that Optane never really beat their pricing per TBW to make a practical product. I have to wonder if it isn't usable for some kind of specialized AI workflow that would benefit from extremely low latency reads but which is isn't written often, at this point. Perhaps integrated in a G…
Optane practical TBW endurance is way higher than that of even TLC flash, never mind QLC or PLC which is the current standard for consumer NAND hardware. It even seems to go way beyond what's stated on the spec sheet. However, while Optane excels for write-heavy workloads (not read-heavy, where NAND actually performs very well) these are also power-hungry which is a limitation for modern AI workflow.
You're conflating two things. Yes, Optane would survive more writes. But it wouldn't survive more TBW/$, because much larger flash drives were available cheaper. Double the size of the drive using identical technology, and you double TBW ratings.
Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Optane M.2-format hardware exists.
Interesting, all I ever saw advertised was that weird persistent kinda slow RAM stick. Does the M.2 version just show up as a normal block device or is that too trying to be persistent RAM?
Just normal (and fast) block storage.
Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like this is proving my point. You can’t read “Optane” and have any real idea of what you’re buying. Also… were those weird hybrid SSDs even implemented by actual hardware, or were they part of the giant series of massive kludges in the “Rapid Storage” family where some secret sauce in the PCIe host lied to the OS about what was actually connected so an Intel driver could replace the OS’s native storage driver…
> were those weird hybrid SSDs even implemented by actual hardware, or were they part of the giant series of massive kludges They were definitely part of the series of massive kludges. But aside from the Intel platforms they were marketed for, I never found a PCIe host that could see both of the NVMe devices on the drive. Some hosts would bring up the x2 link to the Optane half of the drive, some hosts would bring up…
Why on Earth did Intel implement this as a 2x2 device? They could have implemented multiple functions or they could have used a PCIe switch or they could have exposed their device as an NVMe device with multiple namespaces, etc. (I won’t swear that all of these would have worked nicely. But all of them would have performed better than arbitrarily splitting the link in half.)
Maybe they didn’t own any of the IP for the conventional SSD part and couldn’t make it play ball?
Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Write endurance of the drive would be measured in TBW, and TLC flash kept adding enough 3D layers to stay cheap enough, quickly enough, that Optane never really beat their pricing per TBW to make a practical product. I have to wonder if it isn't usable for some kind of specialized AI workflow that would benefit from extremely low latency reads but which is isn't written often, at this point. Perhaps integrated in a G…
The extra capacity of modern SSD is a good point, especially now that we have 100TB+ SSD. But Optane still offered 100 DWPD (drive writes per day), up to 3.2TB. Thats still just so many more DWPD than flash ssd. A Kioxia CM8V for example will do 12TB at 3 DWPD. The net TBW is still 10x apart. You can get back to high endurance with SLC drives like the Solidigm p7-p5810, but you're back down to 1.6TB and 50 DWPD, so,…
We don't care about (TBW/TB) at the consumer level, we care about (TBW/$), and 3D TLC was far, far cheaper per TB, so much so that TBW/$ was not a numerical advantage of Optane.
That left ONLY the near-RAM-read-latency, which is only highly beneficial on specific workloads. Then they didn't invest in expanding killer app software that could utilize that latency, and didn't drop prices sufficiently to make it highly competitive with big RAMdisks.
Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)
#130I think a factor in Optane's demise was dishonesty on the part of low-end laptop manufacturers.
You were a poor student looking for an entry-level cheap laptop and saw a lot of models with 4GB [RAM] "memory" and suddenly there was this one model with "20 GB memory" for the same price. Seemed attractive to the regular guy, but this in fact was 4GB RAM + 16 GB Optane non-volatile storage (and maybe a paltry 32 GB SSD for the rest). Optane would be treated as a drive for storing the Windows OS.
That conflation of Optane storage as "memory", hinting that this was equal to RAM, turned many people against it once they fell victims to that bait-and-switch.