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Comment by temuze | Hacker News Reader

Looks faster than an SSD to me. From the FAQ:

"Q4: Will Intel Optane memory also accelerate an SSD? If so how much?

A: Yes. Intel Optane memory can be used to accelerate any type of SATA-based storage media, including SATA SSDs, However, the performance benefit of adding Intel Optane memory will be greater on slower storage devices like an HDD versus a relatively faster storage device like a SATA-SSD. Additional performance data is forthcoming"

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-tech...

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It's faster than SATA SSD but slower than most NVMe M.2 SSDs: http://www.anandtech.com/show/11227/intel-launches-optane-me.... Because of when this was launched, and the fact it only works with newer processors that also support NVMe, by the time it is at all common place, so would M.2 SSDs, making it a weird concept. It's essentially the most expensive per GB NVMe drive, with worse performance, and some software to automate caching.

Except for the fact that it hits max throughput at way lower queue depths, is bit addressable, and it destroys mixed workloads since you can read while writing. I don't think it'll be revolutionary, but it will be quite nice for caching, databases, or even as a write cache using something like ZFS's zil, then flushing to NVMe SSDs

I don't know, that sounds like a pretty small niche at the end of the day. If it describes you workload I would jump on it ASAP because a year from now it will probably be discontinued.

It sounds like the cache layer to an SSD and should be internal, not a separate device.

Just FYI, there's no such thing as "processors that also support NVMe".

Intel's Windows-only caching software for the Optane Memory product will refuse to work on any but the newest Intel platforms, but any other caching software will work fine on any platform that supports PCIe. If it turns out that small Optane caches are worth what Intel's charging for the hardware, then the existing third-party caching solutions will get tuned to make full use of Optane.

I don't think GP is talking about SATA SSD. Based on the performance, definitely it is PCIe NVMe SSD ( 960 IMO )

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