Intel Optane H10 M2 SSD

[SpyderTracks]

Hiya all

Now, Intel Optane has been a little bit of a niche product for most, whilst it definitely offers impressive performance improvements for HDD's, for me at least there's the the price issue (just waaay too expensive) versus gaining performance on a drive I only use for performance, so personally it hasn't really stacked up.

Not sure how many of you have heard of the upcoming H10 which is essentially an Intel 660p M2 drive paired with a 30Gb allocation of Optane cache. I think release sizes are going to be 256Gb, 512Gb and 1Tb of storage.

They specifically mention that the real improvements are seen when working with very large files such as video editing or large datasets, really aimed atm at prosumers, but it's beginning to excite me, and it will be interesting to see what the cost comes down to for this drive. There are performance gains for general usage as you'll see, it's weather the cost/performance ratio makes it worth it over a normal M2 for most uses.

Definitely heading in the right direction though me thinks.

 

[Scott]

Normal M2 performance is blistering in my opinion. I still think Optane will remain in a niche market. Anyone who is a prosumer would likely choose the more professional options of the M2 variants. The Samsung Pro, for example, is insanely quick, even with random read/writes.

I get that the Optane will be quicker with random read writes on paper but real world I don't know if it will make that much difference for most.

Having said that, if the pricing sees it in the same ballpark with throughput being similar then there would be no reason not to choose Optane.

 

[SpyderTracks]

Normal M2 performance is blistering in my opinion. I still think Optane will remain in a niche market. Anyone who is a prosumer would likely choose the more professional options of the M2 variants. The Samsung Pro, for example, is insanely quick, even with random read/writes.

I get that the Optane will be quicker with random read writes on paper but real world I don't know if it will make that much difference for most.

Having said that, if the pricing sees it in the same ballpark with throughput being similar then there would be no reason not to choose Optane.

Absolutely, it all comes down to the cost they pitch it at. This is the first iteration also and the 660p drive it’s based on isn’t the best performer in the world. If they release a premium drive based on the 760p and the benefits of optane push it even further past the Samsung pro levels then that would be interesting.

 

[Stephen M]

I was very cynical about Optane at first as it seemed another semi-scam along the lines of the Seagate hybrid drives but having seen the initial progress and talked with a couple of friends who have a much better understanding of how these things work than I do, it seems Optane has the potential to become a genuinely good product.

 

[ubuysa]

Well I'm a cynic, as you all well know, but it does look to me as though Intel are struggling to find a market for Optane.

Although my real-word experience of cached drives is old now, the performance of any cached drive is always going to be highly dependent on the data access patterns and the type of data being accessed. It's also very easy to create benchmark data that makes a cached drive look good.

It is interesting though and I'm sure that Optane will prove beneficial in certain niche applications or systems, but I'd be concerned about its cost/benefit in a general purpose system. I could well be wrong though, I've been wrong before!

 

[Tony1044]

I think it'll come down to a few things, ultimately:

What the disk size to Optane cache ratio is. Too small and it'll inevitably end up a bottleneck
How well the caching algorithms run/work
How well Intel can integrate it into their SSD so that it's a seamless part of it

And of course, the cost of them will play a big part.

For the pro's / data centres there are already other options such as PCIe NVME and

Well I'm a cynic, as you all well know, but it does look to me as though Intel are struggling to find a market for Optane.

Although my real-word experience of cached drives is old now, the performance of any cached drive is always going to be highly dependent on the data access patterns and the type of data being accessed. It's also very easy to create benchmark data that makes a cached drive look good.

It is interesting though and I'm sure that Optane will prove beneficial in certain niche applications or systems, but I'd be concerned about its cost/benefit in a general purpose system. I could well be wrong though, I've been wrong before!

Nah I am with you on that.

Too much chance for a cache miss for most things. Now if it could be used to store say just the OS...that could be interesting.