Hi,
They are and always were way too expensive.

Disappointing, especially as we don't appear to be having a drive supply crisis quite as bad as back in 2011 and 2012.

I never like the "Optane as a consumer HDD cache" method. Intel-platform-only and by the time you added the cost of the Optane stick and HDD together, you could have just bought a bigger, better SSD that performed better than the Optane-accelerated HDD instead.

As for the NVMe SSD competitors like the 900P, they were never much faster than NMVe drives at launch, and have actually fallen behind the more recent generation of PCIe 4.0 SSDs.

I'm sure a few of you can point out niche scenarios where Optane is still the superior consumer solution, but Intel didn't think it was enough of a market to pursue, and I can't say I blame them.

That didn’t last for very long. 2017-2021

Sad. If it wasn't for my work's encryption requirements, this would've been my SSD of choice. Sadly, I never even got the chance to sink my cash into one, as they don't support OPAL.

They were always a cool tech, but yeah, way overpriced and I'm guessing the margins weren't there.

QLC=Possible widespread Windows file corruption ahead?

It makes sense. I don't think Optane is selling well in the retail space. I like that it is fast, but (1)capacity is very limited, (2)very expensive, (3)higher capacity drives draw more power, and (4)limited mostly to Intel hardware. Comparatively, common NVME SSDs don't have these issues.

It's a pity that Intel gives up Optane at consumer market.

Since Optane uses phase change material, it is expected to have a long data retention time.
At least I'll use an Optane SSD to put a copy of my important data for 10-20 years offline storaging.
But if you do this on NANDs even SLC ones, your data will lost.

MelonGxIt's a pity that Intel gives up Optane at consumer market.

Since Optane uses phase change material, it is expected to have a long data retention time.
At least I'll use an Optane SSD to put a copy of my important data for 10-20 years offline storaging.
But if you do this on NANDs even SLC ones, your data will lost.

So it means being forced back to spinners? The platter-drive industry is far from dead. But if you go that route, I recommend CMR.

Always dreamed about having that 1.5TB 905p

I'm hoping that this is just until they sell off their NAND. My first SSD was an intel MLC (that is still being used) and if Intel decides to ditch Optane, then I'm hoping Micron decides to sell it as a consumer option. I think it had potential, but Intel didn't commit to it in the consumer market like it did NAND SSDs. Even if the margins are smaller than Intel would like, it would be a better to have a broader range of products once their CPU market starts taking a hit from AMD and ARM.

Chrispy_I never like the "Optane as a consumer HDD cache" method. Intel-platform-only and by the time you added the cost of the Optane stick and HDD together, you could have just bought a bigger, better SSD that performed better than the Optane-accelerated HDD instead.

As for the NVMe SSD competitors like the 900P, they were never much faster than NMVe drives at launch, and have actually fallen behind the more recent generation of PCIe 4.0 SSDs.

I'm sure a few of you can point out niche scenarios where Optane is still the superior consumer solution, but Intel didn't think it was enough of a market to pursue, and I can't say I blame them.

Optane is faster than any PCIe 4.0 SSDs, there is no point in having SSDs that can transfer 1000000TB/s of data except maybe people that work with VERY large files. The important thing is latency and Optane SSDs destroy all the competition.

Man, some Intel fanbois are going to be upset, as they've been touting optane as a key selling point to go with Intel over AMD.

They probably foresee they won't be able to funnel the required resources into further developing this for a while. Because surely they can see what a cash cow this would be.

GungarOptane is faster than any PCIe 4.0 SSDs, there is no point in having SSDs that can transfer 1000000TB/s of data except maybe people that work with VERY large files. The important thing is latency and Optane SSDs destroy all the competition.

Fraction ms of latencies with ridiculous price and restricted to Z platform only while 4K random and QD32 still depend on mechanical? Pretty much destroy all competition except it is doesn't quite far better than "free" AMD StoreMI, and still, it's always better get real SSD than using both solution. With small to mediocre substantial benefit, I think Optane is not well suited for consumer market.

This was DOA to begin with. Much like most other stuff Intel devised when they were still king of the hill and still seek to continue.

If you want the market to carry stuff, you either need to own it, or you need to lead it.

Would be nice if Micron would take over and sell their own version of Optane (3D Xpoint) SSDs in the consumer market; especially as we shift to PCIe 5.0 in the near future (Intel supposedly first; but I'm not holding my breath). Help bring the cost down by making it platform agnostic as long as the support is there (Intel, AMD, ARM, etc). Maybe do the same with Optane-like RAM.

GungarOptane is faster than any PCIe 4.0 SSDs, there is no point in having SSDs that can transfer 1000000TB/s of data except maybe people that work with VERY large files. The important thing is latency and Optane SSDs destroy all the competition.

Optane's latency and IOPS are so much better than anything a consumer workload needs, though.

I'm not pretending that Optane isn't the highest-IOPS, lowest-latency product you can buy; I'm saying that regular NAND SSDs already have enough IOPS and low enough latency that consumer software rarely or never even approaches their limits.

Meanwhile with NAND SSDs hitting 7GB/s transfers at 1/10th the price of Optane which caps out at 2.5GB/s, Optane is massively, obviously deficient in a very visible, measurable consumer metric, whilst costing 10x too much. If you're looking at squential performance/$, something like the Samsung 980 Pro is 25x better than Optane. That's a performance/$ ratio that is too hard for almost anyone to ignore.

I think Optane is a great product, but like Intel, I don't agree it's a good fit for most consumers. The remaining, tiny handful of consumers who would be interested in Optane's very specific latency advantage and who can also can swallow the cost and limited transfer rate disadvantages is such a tiny sliver of a market that it's not worth Intel catering to them.

With the best NAND SSDs available today, Optane latency is still 60% lower, but it's sequential throughput is also 60% lower. That means that for it to be a better choice than a PCIe SSD you need your consumer workload to exceed 20K IOPS and not involve any significant sequential components. Honestly, it's damn near impossible to find anything that needs even half of that without admitting that it's no longer a consumer workload at that point.

If you need enterprise-class IOPS then Optane isn't going away, they're just not selling it to consumers anymore, and I think that is the right decision.

Hi,
It just takes a true enthusiast to fork out for one.... and there just isn't that many willing too :-)

Vayra86This was DOA to begin with. Much like most other stuff Intel devised when they were still king of the hill and still seek to continue.

If you want the market to carry stuff, you either need to own it, or you need to lead it.

Why do you say it was DOA? Optane fixes many shortcomings of current SSDs: 4k random reads, data retention. I see a lot of potential there. Sure, there's still stuff to figure out/improve, but it's not like SSDs didn't have their teething problems back in the day.

bugWhy do you say it was DOA? Optane fixes many shortcomings of current SSDs: 4k random reads, data retention. I see a lot of potential there. Sure, there's still stuff to figure out/improve, but it's not like SSDs didn't have their teething problems back in the day.

Proprietary. Intel already had it well cemented in their product stack...

Somehow the penny has to drop sometime that industry effort = industry effort, not some boardroom meeting of what the next shareholder carrot might be. Seeing this a lot lately. The top 3% is trying to get the bottom 98% now, because why stop at 97. RT is another such 'industry effort' that seems to gain momentum at a snail's pace. And lo and behold... supply issues galore, further dampening that pace, and maintaining a chicken-egg situation. And its not like demand will go down in the near future either. So why exactly were we building humongous dies again?

Today's tech developments are a hot, buggy mess. IoT - more of the same.... I can mention another half dozen recent examples I think. Its all about money before a long-term, well carried investment it seems. Sure, we can chalk it up to 'innovation'... but is it truly that before greed? Lots of innovation I'm seeing doesn't radically improve much if anything. Optane is similar, if Intel really felt this was much needed, why was it pushed like this?

And the kicker is, they even half crowdfund-beta test that shit on customers with product that really isn't ready for store shelves at all.

I had one of these it died in a month, worst shit Intel made along those cpus that run on an old tech from7 years ago

Vayra86Proprietary. Intel already had it well cemented in their product stack...

Somehow the penny has to drop sometime that industry effort = industry effort, not some boardroom meeting of what the next shareholder carrot might be. Seeing this a lot lately. The top 3% is trying to get the bottom 98% now, because why stop at 97. RT is another such 'industry effort' that seems to gain momentum at a snail's pace. And lo and behold... supply issues galore, further dampening that pace, and maintaining a chicken-egg situation. And its not like demand will go down in the near future either. So why exactly were we building humongous dies again?

Today's tech developments are a hot, buggy mess. IoT - more of the same.... I can mention another half dozen recent examples I think. Its all about money before a long-term, well carried investment it seems. Sure, we can chalk it up to 'innovation'... but is it truly that before greed? Lots of innovation I'm seeing doesn't radically improve much if anything. Optane is similar, if Intel really felt this was much needed, why was it pushed like this?

I disagree.
It's perfectly fine for a market newcomer to be proprietary at first. If you try to standardize first, not only will you never release anything anymore, you'll end up standardizing the wrong things (proper standardization needs to come in response to market trends, it cannot come before there are trends to standardize).
And if you are strictly talking about Optane being restricted to select Intel chipsets, I'm pretty sure that was a combo of some engineering challenges and Intel trying to boost sales a little. Much like AMD has just introduced SAM. Sure, I would have preferred Optane was just another PCIe add-in card, but I wouldn't call the whole tech DOA just because it needed some firmware wizardry.

bugI disagree.
It's perfectly fine for a market newcomer to be proprietary at first. If you try to standardize first, not only will you never release anything anymore, you'll end up standardizing the wrong things (proper standardization needs to come in response to market trends, it cannot come before there are trends to standardize).
And if you are strictly talking about Optane being restricted to select Intel chipsets, I'm pretty sure that was a combo of some engineering challenges and Intel trying to boost sales a little. Much like AMD has just introduced SAM. Sure, I would have preferred Optane was just another PCIe add-in card, but I wouldn't call the whole tech DOA just because it needed some firmware wizardry.

Alright let's take SAM.

What was the immediate follow-up PR message to SAM working on specific AMD stuff?
'We will bring it to everything else'.

Let's take adaptive sync now... we know where that went.... and faster storage? Done over existing standards or already agreed upon iterations like PCIE 4.0.

I think the margin on what new tech must do to be better than the old AND the actual development and production cost of said improvements is already heavily in the range of diminishing returns and therefore needs full industry support. Look at memory! The same thing occurs. This world and its resources or its ideas and possible improvements are not infinite and we need to pool our stuff to get further along with progress. We're reaching the end of silicon, too.

Similarly, why is Zen so successful? Because it is economically viable, it is highly efficient wrt die size / performance / price. Chiplet design makes economic sense and is a logical step forward when individual die sizes keep growing because you're effectively killing part of your node progress with ever bigger die requirements, and this will increase the net cost of chips across the board.

The same problem is now going to turn onto RT/RTX. The market can't supply for the demand and devs can't afford the extra development step either.

Chrispy_I never like the "Optane as a consumer HDD cache" method. Intel-platform-only and by the time you added the cost of the Optane stick and HDD together, you could have just bought a bigger, better SSD that performed better than the Optane-accelerated HDD instead.

SSD caching of a HDD is definitely great to have. The cost of the Optane stick and HDD definitely is a lot cheaper than just a big SSD. I mean, show me an 8TB SSD that I can get for the same price as an 8TB HDD+Optane. Even at 2TB the HDD+Optane becomes cheaper.

My problem with Optane Caching is that it is really just a rebranding of their Rapid Storage technology that let you use any SSD as a cache for HDDs. Heck, you could just create a small partition on the OS SSD and use that partition as a cache for the HDD. It was really nice. I wish they would have continue to develop that instead of trying to use it as a tool to sell Optane SSD.

But now with programse like PrimoCache, using Intel's tech is pointless if you are looking for an SSD cache for your HDD.