Comment by jauntywundrkind
6 hours ago
Cost was fantastically cheap, if you take into account that Optane is going to live >>10x longer than a SSD.
For a lot of bulk storage, yes, you don't have frequently changing data. But for databases or caches, that are under heavy load, optane was not only far faster, but if looking at life-cycle costs, way way less.
Optane was in the market during a time when the mainstream trend in the SSD industry was all about sacrificing endurance to get higher capacity. It's been several years, and I'm not seeing a lot of regrets from folks who moved to TLC and QLC NAND, and those products are more popular than ever.
The niche that could actually make use of Optane's endurance was small and shrinking, and Intel had no roadmap to significantly improve Optane's $/GB which was unquestionably the technology's biggest weakness.
Write endurance of the drive would be measured in TBW, and TLC flash kept adding enough 3D layers to stay cheap enough, quickly enough, that Optane never really beat their pricing per TBW to make a practical product.
I have to wonder if it isn't usable for some kind of specialized AI workflow that would benefit from extremely low latency reads but which is isn't written often, at this point. Perhaps integrated in a GPU board.
Optane practical TBW endurance is way higher than that of even TLC flash, never mind QLC or PLC which is the current standard for consumer NAND hardware. It even seems to go way beyond what's stated on the spec sheet. However, while Optane excels for write-heavy workloads (not read-heavy, where NAND actually performs very well) these are also power-hungry which is a limitation for modern AI workflow.
The extra capacity of modern SSD is a good point, especially now that we have 100TB+ SSD.
But Optane still offered 100 DWPD (drive writes per day), up to 3.2TB. Thats still just so many more DWPD than flash ssd. A Kioxia CM8V for example will do 12TB at 3 DWPD. The net TBW is still 10x apart.
You can get back to high endurance with SLC drives like the Solidigm p7-p5810, but you're back down to 1.6TB and 50 DWPD, so, 1/4 the Intel P5800X endurance, and worse latencies. I highly suspect the drive model here is a homage, and in spite of being much newer and very expensive, the original is still so much better in so many ways. https://www.solidigm.com/content/solidigm/us/en/products/dat...
You also end up paying for what I assume is a circa six figure drive, if you are substituting DWPD with more capacity than you need. There's something elegant about being able to keep using your cells, versus overbuying on cells with the intent to be able to rip through them relatively quickly.
So instead of replacing every 5 years you replace every 5 years because if you need that level of performance you're replacing servers every 5 years anyway