Hacker News Reader

Comment by ihsw2 | Hacker News Reader

It is very exciting to see Optane competitive with conventional NVMe drives -- this is something that Intel got right early and their exploration into DIMM-socketed Optane drives is similarly exciting.

It has already been established that for most consumer workloads, the latency differences between memory and Optane is negligible. This article shows that heavy-duty workloads (ie: high-traffic memcached clusters) can be accommodated by Optane and NVMe too. Clusters of 500K IOPS drives can take us most of the way there.

I don't want to get all /r/hailcorporate but Optane drives are great products and (more importantly) you can run them on AMD platforms (ie: SP3) too. Granted, NVMe drives bring the fight and they're much more cost competitive at scale, but that will change soon.

View on HN

> and (more importantly) you can run them on AMD platforms (ie: SP3) too

Wait, you can? I thought Optane required specific motherboards for the DIMM versions? From what I understand, the M.2/nvme devices just show up as a drive in Linux right?

But I thought the actual DDR4/DIMMS only work in certain Xeon boards.

I suppose they're relating to Optane SSD[0], not Optane memory.

[0] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/memory-stor...

Ah, the DDR4/DIMM Optane models are not yet publicly available (which should significantly bring us closer to parity with memory latency), and I was referring to the Optane NVMe drives being compatible with AMD systems.

I love toys and I would love to jump feet first into optane, but a dollar per gigabyte is hard to stomach.

About a decade ago, I paid around $600 for the 80GB X25-M, the first SSD that focused on performance rather than just low latency. One of the best system upgrades I've ever had.

A dollar per gigabyte doesn't seem half bad at all for the top end of performance.

My first hard drive upgrade was a 80MB HardCard - an ISA hard disk for my PC XT 286. I recall it cost clost to $1,000.

There's always going to be the top tier storage that costs an arm and a leg - that just means two steps down gets affordable. Optane pricing will drive down NVME which will drive down SATA SSD.

The main issue is that video gamers don't see any benefits to NVMe NAND drives. So the "hardcore gamer" market is beginning to stall out on SATA SSD drives.

Why pay 2x more for NVMe NAND if your video game load times aren't any better?

They are better at load times. Just not 2x better.

The price/performance of a couple 860 Evos in raid0 is hard to beat

>a dollar per gigabyte is hard to stomach.

My first HD in 1991 cost like $100 and was 40MB. So, there's that.

Besides "a dollar per gigabyte" is $1000 for 1TB.

512MB SSDs used to cost ~ $1000 just 5-8 years back...

I feel my sibling comments (I paid $x y years ago, get off my lawn) are missing your point. If you're looking to fill a whole datacenter with Optane the price compared to current storage tech is eye watering. This technology is aimed at servers with a high IO load and a lot of RAM caching, not home users.

Of course, as with previous SSD tech, the price will come down fairly rapidly.

They have quite a ways to go before I'd be happier treating them as RAM for something like memcached... but it's a good start. The IOPS is very low and the latency is still quite a ways off from RAM. For a lot of other workloads it seems doable if expensive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com