Intel Optane shipping!!!

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in General Discussion
Intel's first hyper-fast 3D drive is meant for servers
You can get the drive right now if you're part of Intel's early shipping program, and there are promises of larger capacities (750GB and 1.5TB) and U.2 form factors coming later in 2017.

Intel Introduces the World’s Most Responsive Data Center Solid State Drive
Today, Intel unveiled the Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X Series and Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X Series with Intel Memory Drive Technology, enabling new possibilities to transform storage and memory architectures for the data center.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 2
    tallest skiltallest skil Posts: 43,388member
    Think Apple will get a microPCI (or whatever port they use) version for the next Mac Pro in 2020?
  • Reply 2 of 2
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,481moderator
    Think Apple will get a microPCI (or whatever port they use) version for the next Mac Pro in 2020?
    The price is high just now at $4/GB and SSD will most likely stay much more cost-effective in the near future. I think this has more use as a non-volatile RAM cache because the random writes are so high and the price is low vs RAM. $4/GB means that a 32GB cache would be $128, which is very cheap for 32GB of RAM and every base 15" MBP, 27" iMac and MP could come standard with the equivalent of 48GB RAM. When saving files, they can be saved to this cache very quickly and then transferred to the standard SSD in the background if needed. The cache can actually be used to store most frequent files to save wear on the SSD and boot the OS and open files almost instantly.

    Eventually it will probably be cheap enough to have just that kind of storage but on the way there, a tiered approach of varying performance storage will give much the same experience for a much lower cost. Rather than having 1-2TB at $4-8k, it would be $500-1000 SSD coupled with a fast 32GB+ cache. In cases where people deal with 100-200GB at a time the $4-8k drive would show a benefit but this would be rare even in high-end workflows. This kind of storage in high capacities is meant for servers where they are constantly hitting the storage for small files and chunks of data from databases to serve up to thousands/millions of people at the same time.
    edited March 2017
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