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posted by martyb on Monday October 30 2017, @04:54PM   Printer-friendly
from the ecks-point?-ten-point?-cross-point!??! dept.

Intel has announced new 3D XPoint "Optane" solid state drives at two capacities:

The Intel Optane SSD 900P will come to market in two capacity sizes, 280GB and 480GB. The series uses two form factors, 2.5" U.2 and half-height, half-length add-in card (AIC). This will start to get confusing so look closely. The 280GB will have two 2.5" models on launch day. One comes with a standard U.2 cable and the second comes with an M.2 to U.2 adapter cable. The 480GB will not ship in a 2.5" form factor until a later date. It will ship in the add-in card form factor starting today.

Regardless of the form factor or capacity size, all Optane SSD 900P drives deliver up to 2,500 MBps sequential read and 2,000 MBps sequential write performance. This is lower than some of the other high-performance NVMe SSDs shipping today, but we will address that in the next section. The drives also deliver up to 550,000 random read and 500,000 random write IOPS performance. This is class leading performance, but there is more to the story.

3D XPoint memory performance is closer to the speed of DRAM than NAND used in SSDs. SSD marketing numbers show maximum performance that comes only at high queue depths. Most of us rarely surpass queue depth 4 and the faster the storage, the less likely you are to even build data requests. This memory addresses the problem with performance at usable workloads.

In the chart [here] we have the three fastest Intel consumer storage products from different market segments: SATA SSD, NVMe SSD, and Optane NVMe SSD. We've also added the new Seagate BarraCuda Pro 12TB, the fastest consumer hard disk drive shipping today.

Pricing is $390 for 280 GB, and $600 for 480 GB. That's $1.25/GB for the larger drive, compared to $2.34/GB for the 32 GB Optane Memory M.2 2280 and the launch price of $4.05/GB for the 375 GB Optane SSD DC P4800X (Reviewed here).

3D XPoint is a non-volatile memory/storage technology.

Previously: First Intel Optane 3D XPoint SSD Released: 375 GB for $1520
Intel Announces Optane 16 GB and 32 GB M.2 Modules
Intel Announces "Ruler" Form Factor for Server SSDs


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 30 2017, @05:20PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 30 2017, @05:20PM (#589544)

    The key advantage, if I'm not mistaken, of 3D XPoint over flash is in the number of writes that are possible before it wears out. These should be good where there are data that frequently change. Swapped-out virtual memory is an obvious application.

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Monday October 30 2017, @06:00PM (1 child)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Monday October 30 2017, @06:00PM (#589561) Journal

    Even with a recent uptick in DRAM prices [soylentnews.org], it shouldn't be hard to get many gigabytes of it. XPoint is better than NAND flash as virtual memory, but is it good enough?

    XPoint could be great for storing OS and applications. This was true for the 16-32 GB modules, and now these are quite a bit larger and should be capable of storing most productive applications and a few games.

    The lower $/GB here could be a game changer for some, but it is still at least 5-6x more expensive than flash.

    --
    [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
    • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday October 30 2017, @06:28PM

      by bob_super (1357) on Monday October 30 2017, @06:28PM (#589579)

      > should be capable of storing most productive applications and a few games.

      Most productive applications, and essentially every single game, would not noticeably benefit from Optane over NVMe SSD. Good caching, and other bottlenecks, mean that it's not worth the price for the actual experienced speed gains.

      To start stretching those legs, you really need to go into server I/O workloads.