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58GB Intel Optane SSD P1600X Enterprise 3D XPoint NVMe SSD $33

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Created 03-22-2023 at 12:09 AM by sr71
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ulieq
03-22-2023 at 06:59 AM.
03-22-2023 at 06:59 AM.
This SSD doesn't have any value in a NVME Gen3+ world, am I right?
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RadiantCandy
04-19-2023 at 07:17 PM.
04-19-2023 at 07:17 PM.
Quote from ulieq :
This SSD doesn't have any value in a NVME Gen3+ world, am I right?
Not even slightly true. Optane 3D Xpoint devices use a completely different technology than traditional flash based solid state storage. If all you care about is max bandwidth or iops or first response latency, then it might be hard to see the benefit of something like this.

Regular flash memory stores bits as an electrical charge, by basically forcing electrons into little narrow tubes, and then measuring the charges later. The problem with that approach, combined with the shrinking size of components and the increased densities used in this nvme gen3+ world, is that those charges like to wander off over time. So we're storing fewer and fewer electrons in smaller and more fragile cells, with things being fragile enought that even 10 years ago if you were to leave an ssd in a drawer for a year or two you might have dozens of errors, or hundreds of thousands of errors. In the last few years I've had at least 3 occasions where I've had ssd's become corrupt in just a few hours by accidentally leaving them sitting on the dash of car in the sun on a hot summer day. That's hours, not days or weeks of being in a hot car - just hours. (... to be fair, that it's happened to me three times may be as much a comment on me as on the technology, but still - wasn't a problem 10 years ago.).

3D Xpoint works by forming a sort of rigid crystaline matrix with known gap widths between the nodes, and then exciting that matrix so as to cause it to soften, while shoving some atoms of a different material into the matrix - atoms who are large enough that they get trapped inside the crystal when you let the crystal relax back to normal. Use the same basic trick to push trapped atoms back out of the matrix. Changing the topology of a region changes the measurable resistance of that region, so you can use that as a way to store 1's and 0's.

Huge difference in how those two things work. In a performance per cm^2 comparison Optane is way faster than flash - dramatically so. Flash was only able to catch up to optane in the SSD space by striping data across tons of segments of flash and making controllers that can read those segments in parallel - ie by cheating . Optane is running SIGNIFICANTLY below it's capability when used in an SSD. Think a souped up Nascar vehicle that is stuck in city traffic. To really see what Optane can do you should look up what Optane persistant memory was/is - ie the same Optane modules that are used in an SSD, but used as the chips on a stick of ram, and running at nearly ram speeds. When allowed to demonstrate it's full potential, Optane vs Flash starts to look like a competition between a guerilla and a toddler.

The Optane method can initially sound complicated, but compared to how conventional flash works it is WAY simpler. With flash you are spinning a plate on a stick to store information, and having to spin the plates at different specific speeds because you decided to store more than one bit plate, and then also having to account for plates rubbing against the plate next to them and the impact it has on both of the plates spin, and oh yeah that one plate over there fell over, and.. All that complexity transaltes to the cost of manufacture - Optane would have been cheaper than flash if the plants had been able to run 24/7 like flash plants do. Only reason it was expensive was lack of buyers, so the production lines were paused most of the time.

Oh, and write endurance? You can fill a Samsung 980 Pro to it's full capacity 600 times before the drive is considered worn out. For the Intel Optane P5800X is rated to endure being filled to capacity about 20,000 times within the 5 year warranty period - and that's just Intel being conservative, there's no reason that an Optane drive can't last hundreds of thousands of overwrites, given the opportunity.
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Last edited by RadiantCandy April 19, 2023 at 07:28 PM.
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