Intel axes consumer Optane drives

Optane always seemed to come with a bit too much baggage. Instead of releasing it as what could have been the best SSD on the market, they tried too hard to have it tied to their platforms. Reminds me of what Nvidia tried to do with G-Sync only to see Freesync totally eclipse it due to being more compatible.

Hopefully they will eventually come out with new products where they learn from their mistakes. I've owned a lot of Intel SSDs over the years and IMO they are second only to Samsung.
 
Optane's setup sucked when I tried it......bios updates, then enabling things in bios, then installing windows software, then pairing in bios.........then hoping it worked......what a colossal PITA, no way that was ever going to be anything but an enthusiast item. Making it worse was that if the drive (the gum stick m.2) was ever disconnected from the hard drive you paired it to, if anything happened to either of them, you were screwed. The Optane would basically re-write the FAT/NFS so you couldn't read those folders anymore via windows without the optane gum stick sitting in between, at least that was my problem........user error was part of it but in the end, what a convoluted mess just to get faster performance from mechanicals.
 
Optane always seemed to come with a bit too much baggage. Instead of releasing it as what could have been the best SSD on the market, they tried too hard to have it tied to their platforms. Reminds me of what Nvidia tried to do with G-Sync only to see Freesync totally eclipse it due to being more compatible.

Hopefully they will eventually come out with new products where they learn from their mistakes. I've owned a lot of Intel SSDs over the years and IMO they are second only to Samsung.
The 900p / 905p were standalone platform independent drives not intended for use with Optane Memory Acceleration.
 
Optane sucks because it's mixed performance bag. It has much higher IOps than flash, but the doen't get high enough write throuput without exactly as many channels as Flash. It's also much slower than just using DRAM cache in SSDs.

The cell write lifetimes are identical to flash, so why bother? This resistive Ram was supppsed to be so much better, and also be able to replace DRAM!
 
I guess I completely misunderstood the nature of the sale.


It's called, flash market had become saturated / more volatile with the peak of smart phones around 2016, and only custom makers like Apple/Samsung have ways around those falling sales.

Intel doesn't have the volume Samsung does, nor the premium brand presence, so it was just cheaper to ditch their entire Flash arm. It's also made redundant by Optane (more useful than flash in servers).
 
Good thing for everyone I think. I haven't become familiar with Intel Optane setups until working in a computer repair shop. They have a lot of issues.
 
It's called, flash market had become saturated / more volatile with the peak of smart phones around 2016, and only custom makers like Apple/Samsung have ways around those falling sales.

Intel doesn't have the volume Samsung does, nor the premium brand presence, so it was just cheaper to ditch their entire Flash arm. It's also made redundant by Optane (more useful than flash in servers).
I was mostly confused with its naming schemes. And what parts they considered flash and what parts they considered optane. Really the whole thing is a optpain in the ass.
 
I never got what it was supposed to do for a desktop. I've never encountered a desktop situation where the transfer rate or latency of the SSD was the issue. You aren't waiting on the SSD to get data, usually if you are waiting it is on the poorly-optimized single threaded loading routine in the software and all the hardware has plenty of bandwidth to spare. Likewise it is easy to have more than enough RAM, 16GB tends to be plenty for a desktop to run whatever people ant at once, no swapping and it isn't like 32GB is expensive.

So what then do you gain from another layer of cache? On servers you can find use cases for something like that where you do need latencies below what normal SSDs offer and RAM is either too expensive, already maxed out, or the data storage must be non-volatile. But you just don't see that on the desktop. It seems like a solution searching for a problem in that case.
 
It's called, flash market had become saturated / more volatile with the peak of smart phones around 2016, and only custom makers like Apple/Samsung have ways around those falling sales.

Intel doesn't have the volume Samsung does, nor the premium brand presence, so it was just cheaper to ditch their entire Flash arm. It's also made redundant by Optane (more useful than flash in servers).

It's typical Wall Street chasing high margins. Flash margins are down, but flash memory, arguably is more important than ever on high tech devices.

The problem with running an Optane only line up is that it only serves certain use cases due to its expense. Previously you can serve your customer up/down the entire storage range. Now you've lost that 'stickiness' when you're forcing customers to turn to another supplier to meet the lower/mass market storage markets. Furthermore, I wouldn't be surprised if Optane margins are high because its integrated in the supply chain of the entire Intel storage line up. Losing that means you're going to eat into Optane margins.

Very reminiscent of HP spinning off their desktop business. HPe was pikachu shocked that the same suppliers raised prices when they could no longer purchase in bulk by piggy backing on their high volume desktop business.
 
The 900p / 905p were standalone platform independent drives not intended for use with Optane Memory Acceleration.
My mistake, thought they were talking about the gum-stick product not the stand alone PCI/ISA slot cards.....
 
That is a shame. I love my 900P as a boot drive where low latency and high random IO performance is more important than sequential throughput. I was looking forward to a PCIE 4.0 version based on gen 2 3D Xpoint. Oh well, this thing will last a long time and maybe Micron will come up with something.

The other thing I like is the endurance versus the flash SSD's. I never have to worry about this thing dying from writes. (Not to say it won't just fail for other reasons.)

I hope Micron comes through. I can stomach "prosumer" pricing, but I won't pay enterprise/datacenter prices.
 
That is a shame. I love my 900P as a boot drive where low latency and high random IO performance is more important than sequential throughput. I was looking forward to a PCIE 4.0 version based on gen 2 3D Xpoint. Oh well, this thing will last a long time and maybe Micron will come up with something.

The other thing I like is the endurance versus the flash SSD's. I never have to worry about this thing dying from writes. (Not to say it won't just fail for other reasons.)

I hope Micron comes through. I can stomach "prosumer" pricing, but I won't pay enterprise/datacenter prices.
The PCIe 4.0 DC P5800X enterprise model is available for purchase already. The enterprise markup maybe worth it for a boot drive.
 
The PCIe 4.0 DC P5800X enterprise model is available for purchase already. The enterprise markup maybe worth it for a boot drive.
Interesting, but about 3X what I would pay at this point. Unless my current drive dies, the real life gains would be hard to justify at that price, especially without a capacity improvement (in fact a reduction from the 900p base model).

The only place I can find a listing is ~$1300 for 400Gb. I felt like I was taking a chance at ~1.2$/Gb for the 900p. In the end I liked it enough to keep it but ~$3.4/Gb is just too much.

Doing some more reading, Micron claims to be working on increasing their offerings based on this tech. So there is a chance.
 
Probably had no fab space to continue this product, considering their 10nm issues
 
Probably had no fab space to continue this product, considering their 10nm issues
No, they had dedicated factories making the chips, they went as part of the sale. They just didn’t move enough of it to invest more back into it.
 
Sadface, was really hoping for a refresh for my 905p, it’s awesome but get bored of having to manage the space.

pretty sure I’d need a new mortgage to get the 1.6tb P5800X
 
Hmmm... That's a shame. I have a HTPC that uses an Optane+6TB HD for a Steam Drive. It works really well like that.

On the flip side, I've reached a point where I can just get 4TB SSD.
 
Hmmm... That's a shame. I have a HTPC that uses an Optane+6TB HD for a Steam Drive. It works really well like that.

On the flip side, I've reached a point where I can just get 4TB SSD.
I am thinking of doing the same thing, either Optane or a caching SSD. Does it feel like you are running an SSD once the Optane has a chance to cache the game files and the operating system? Does it feel fast and responsive?
 
Interesting, but about 3X what I would pay at this point. Unless my current drive dies, the real life gains would be hard to justify at that price, especially without a capacity improvement (in fact a reduction from the 900p base model).

The only place I can find a listing is ~$1300 for 400Gb. I felt like I was taking a chance at ~1.2$/Gb for the 900p. In the end I liked it enough to keep it but ~$3.4/Gb is just too much.

Doing some more reading, Micron claims to be working on increasing their offerings based on this tech. So there is a chance.
When I heard about the creation of 3D Xpoint memory in 2015 I thought it was going to be a paradigm shift for storage but the actual product that we got didn't have the insanely low latency or the performance that Intel/Micron were originally promising, and the cost ended up being so high that for the same price as Optane you can buy an SSD with 5x or 10x the size. Getting 300 mb of 4k read/write speed is very impressive, but it only saves 1-2 seconds in load times.
 
I was really hoping this would push into the "general pop" high end, because it is awesome, it would become cheaper, and be a bit of a force.

Ah well. I'll have to live with "still pretty awesome" instead.
 
Hmmm... That's a shame. I have a HTPC that uses an Optane+6TB HD for a Steam Drive. It works really well like that.

On the flip side, I've reached a point where I can just get 4TB SSD.
I am thinking of doing the same thing, either Optane or a caching SSD. Does it feel like you are running an SSD once the Optane has a chance to cache the game files and the operating system? Does it feel fast and responsive?
Yes, for the common things it takes a while to get things up to speed. But if you’ve ever used a system with a hybrid HDD then it feels basically like using one of those. My SQL server uses Optane and it was a pretty big improvement for the users.
 
Optane sounded great in theory. I think Intel just couldn't get adoption up and production costs down fast enough to make it viable for the consumer market.
 
Optane sounded great in theory. I think Intel just couldn't get adoption up and production costs down fast enough to make it viable for the consumer market.
It was also made obsolete by SDD adoption and streaming media. For the vast majority of people out there a 256 or 512GB NVME drive is more than enough. Not many people currently choosing to rock a 2TB spindle drive as their OS drive.
 
Optane for caching was always a bit silly. It only makes sense really for specialised workloads without changes.

I suspect it will come back in some shape when Microsoft rework the storage layer of windows in line with the consoles but for now the advantages aren’t really there.

if you’ve got Linux properly configured with the 32 queues, massively random data and small files however it’s insanely better than normal ssds.
 
Optane did make sense for a consumer as a high performance gaming rig.

Looking forward for benches on the DC P5800X.

But yes, I'm really sad that Intel discontinued the series. It will be the same product but sold as professional hardware with 2x the price.

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