Hacker News Reader

Comment by cogman10 | Hacker News Reader

IMO, the reason they didn't sell is the ideal usage for them is pairing them with some slow spinning disks. The issue Optane had is that SSD capacity grew dramatically while the price plummeted. The difference between Optane and SSDs was too small. Especially since the M.2 standard proliferated and SSDs took advantage of PCI-E performance.

I believe Optane retained a performance advantage (and I think even today it's still faster than the best SSDs) but SSDs remain good enough and fast enough while being a lot cheaper.

The ideal usage of optane was as a ZIL in ZFS.

View on HN

That may have been the ideal usage back in the day, but ideal usage now is just for setting up swap. Write-heavy workloads are king with Optane, and threshing to swap is the prototypical example of something that's so write-heavy it's a terrible fit for NAND. Optane might not have been "as fast as DRAM" but it was plenty close enough to be fit for purpose.

That would be fine if I could put it in an M.2 slot. But all my computers already have RAM in their RAM slots, and even if I had a spare RAM slot, I don't know that I'd trust the software stack to treat one RAM slot as a drive...

And their whole deal was making RAM persistent anyway, which isn't exactly what I want.

Optane M.2-format hardware exists.

Interesting, all I ever saw advertised was that weird persistent kinda slow RAM stick. Does the M.2 version just show up as a normal block device or is that too trying to be persistent RAM?

Just normal (and fast) block storage.

Iirc it wasn't great because higher power == more heat though

That could be addressed with a small NVMe heatsink. They're available and their use is advised already for NAND PCIe 4.0 and 5.0 hardware, but they would fit the Optane use just as well.

> The ideal usage of optane was as a ZIL in ZFS.

It was also the best boot drive money could buy. Still is, I think, though other comments in the thread ask how it compares against today's best, which I'd also love to see.

This concept was very popular back in the days when computers used to boot from HDD, but now it doesn't make much sense. I wouldn't notice If my laptop boots for 5 sec instead of 10.

At the time of their introduction Optane drives were noticeably faster to boot your machine than even the fastest available Flash SSD. So in a workstation with multiple hard drives installed anyway, buying one to boot off of made decent sense.

If they had been cheaper, I think they'd have been really, really popular.

What concept was very popular in those days?

By my reckoning, there was zero overlap between the period of time where a reasonable computer configurer would pick a hard drive to boot from and the period of time where Optane was available.

And even for the general concept of a cache drive, I don't think I've ever seen it do well in the mainstream. Just a few niche roles, and some hybrid drives that sucked because they had small flash chips and only used them as a read cache, not a write cache.

Not just capacity but SSD speeds also improved to the point it was good enough for many high memory workloads.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com