Last week, Intel announced its new Optane drives meant for server and HPC configurations. Today, the company is announcing its PC client version. The new drives will ship in 16GB and 32GB capacities. They're mostly intended to serve as cache drives for mechanical hard disks, as opposed to being primary storage for an OS or games.
Optane's usefulness in target markets.
Intel is making some impressive claims about Optane's ability to accelerate performance in desktop workloads for all types of users. But it's not clear how much Optane's performance actually differs from an SSD cache drive.
It's been a few years since we wrote about cache drives, but you often see these configurations in midrange laptops to boost performance without costing the OEM very much costing consumers more money. An SSD cache drive is designed to cache the most commonly accessed data based on its analysis of the most common drive workloads and capabilities. Back in 2012, we did a comparison of Intel's SRT cache program versus Nvelo's caching architecture. The slideshow below captures some of our results in that test. Again, these slides are only comparable in the broadest sense. Click on each slide to open it in a new window.
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Our benchmarks show that the biggest gains in performance with an SSD cache drive, at least back then, came from pairing a slower mechanical Caviar Black with an SSD. The hard drive Intel is using is a Western Digital Caviar Black WD1003FZEX, the hard drive we tested 4.5 years ago was a Caviar Black WD1001FALS. All else being equal, we'd expect the WD1003FZEX to be slightly faster, since it offers more cache (64MB vs 32MB) and support for SATA 6G as opposed to SATA II.
Intel's Optane will offer impressive performance acceleration if the company's metrics are accurate.
One thing I want to make extremely clear is that I'm not claiming that an Optane cache drive offers no benefits over and above an SSD cache drive. Eyeballing the numbers, it looks as though the Optane M.2 is faster than an SSD cache relative to baseline performance. The only point I'm making is that SSD cache drives have been offering substantial improvements over and above mechanical hard drives for years, and it's not yet clear how much Optane improves performance compared with this alternative. Its low-level metrics are substantially faster than any SSD cache drive, as is its endurance. It's also possible that Intel's baseline measurements are higher, meaning the Optane drive would still be faster than an SSD cache at the same percentage performance improvement.
These new Optane drives are keyed to support M.2 type B and M.2 type M, but only use two PCI-Express lanes and will not function in a motherboard that only offers SATA connectivity through the M.2 slot. Users should also keep in mind that Optane is only compatible with Intel's 200-series chipsets. Both the 16GB and 32GB drives can be pre-ordered immediately, for $44 and $77 respectively. That's not immediately a great deal, given that 128GB and 256GB SSDs are available at those price points, but we'll have to compare Optane's performance before we can say how much these drives improve over mechanical-only results.
Now read: How do SSDs work?
