Intel Optane Memory has a mission: Make hard drives faster than SSDs
INTEL’S OPTANE MEMORY could be the most revolutionary letdown in storage history. Announced in late March, these first consumer Optane-based devices should be available in late April in two M.2 trims: A 16GB model for $44 and a 32GB Optane Memory device for $77. Both are rated for crazy-fast read speeds of 1.2GBps and writes of 280MBps.
If you’re wondering how you can install Windows 10 on one of these, you can’t. The first two Optane Memory devices instead are meant to be used primarily as cache drives for a traditional hard drive, using a technique similar to the Smart Response Technology (go.pcworld.com/intelsrt) Intel introduced in 2011.
Optane Memory is a far cry from what we expected after Intel and Micron) in 2015. The non-volatile memory was hyped as the next fast thing, promising “1,000X” the performance of today’s NAND-based SSDs with far higher density and lower cost than DRAM. 3D XPoint had me wondering just how it would reshape the PC down the road, when a computer could potentially have a simple 4TB of 3D XPoint memory doing it all, rather than 16GB of RAM and a hard drive. Apparently we have to be patient.
