Intel Optane AMA - Starts Wednesday at 11am

[Steve heller]

Hi, Steve. We see you're active on the Accelerate with Optane GitHub and have forwarded your request to the Optane DC Persistent Memory Team. Thanks for your interest!

Thanks!

 

[Intel_Optane_Team]

I actually bought what was probably one of the first 900p drives (480gb). Using it as my main OS drive, it mostly works fine, but frequently it will be painfully slow and disk usage shows that it's at 100% even though I'm not doing anything than opening up windows file explorer. Is there anything I need to do to make sure that I'm getting the best performance out of it?

Thanks

Hi, Russell. We've never seen a hardware cause for this in our labs. You may want to contact Intel Tech Support for assistance. Here's a link for memory-and-storage support. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000026429/memory-and-storage.html

Your reporting this will help us better understand product behavior in different hardware/software configurations. Thanks!

 

[ikjadoon]

Yes, any system that has been shown to support a standard NVMe SSD should also likely to work with using Intel Optane Memory device as an NVMe SSD.

That's great! Awesome, I just put an order in for a 32GB module; I had been hesitant to buy as I couldn't find a definitive answer.

Thanks for getting to some of these questions; it's nice to see the Optane team answering day-to-day questions. For what it's worth, you can tell the marketing overlords that these do convert some sales so they should let you keep doing them and let you answer more questions

EDIT: pardon the ancient signature...I'll leave it such for nostalgia's stake. This is how long it's been since I've posted here on Anandtech. Interestingly, I've only had three CPUs (long cycles!) and I've always incremented the CPU count by now (a hex-core now).

 

[zir_blazer]

Thanks for your questions!

Thanks for your high quality replies. I'm a bit dissapointed at #3 since you didn't mentioned anything about U.2 adapters

OCuLink is great for connecting a motherboard to a backplane, but nobody is going to put that connector on the drive itself because it doesn't deliver power and doesn't hot-swap well.

I don't see the fact that you need two independent connectors in the drive itself as a limiting factor of any sort. I mean, that is how SATA HDs had been connected for ages. And even if U.2 is a single connector from the drive point of view, it is still a Y cable that has to be connected to both Power Supply and Motherboard.
About hotswapping, I have no idea if OCuLink has problems with that, but if anything, that would limit it to fixed disks or PCIe Devices and not Servers with hotswappeable bays, but that is still a decent usage coverage.

I had no idea what OCuLink was until relatively recently, yet I think that if the industry had pushed OCuLink before SATA Express made its first appereance, modern NVMe interfaces would have been simplified as you wouldn't have the current mess of NVMe form factors and connectors. We have M.2 in Desktop because it became popular for NVMe to fill the void that there were no NVMe SSDs using SATA Express (And that it was limited to two lanes that were already being bottlenecked, while M.2 did four and had some headroom), yet M.2 itself is limited because it is intended as a Mobile form factor first that scaled up to Desktop has cons like poor capacities, poor cooling (Remember the throttling issues on some M.2 NVMe SSDs under sustained usage?), and that sometimes you have to remove another PCIe card to insert/remove the M.2 SSD. Then we have the add in card format, that is simple because where you see a PCIe 4x slot not blocked by a Dual Slot Video Card you can plug the card, but this doesn't scale well with multiple units and it is a bit too big of a form factor. And finally, the closest thing to a classic 2.5' SSD but using NVMe instead of SATA is U.2, which require the "mini"-SAS connector on the Motherboard (Or an adapter using the lanes from somewhere else), that is quite rare, and the rather expensive Y cables (Which typically are not a problem because they come bundled with the U.2 drive, except if you buy one of those used decomissioned server parts).
I think that OCuLink would have been great if it had become popular a few years ago. It is the one that best seems that could have been suited to supercede standard 2.5' SATA drives in feel and use, and least in the Desktop consumer/prosumer space, not sure in enterprise (But there is this with 4 OCuLink, or OCuLink to U.2 adapter like this, so...). Is more a kind of a "what if" scenario, I doubt that you can push the industry around to adopt something else at this point by including OCuLink interfaces in both Motherboard and NVMe Drives.

 

[jsimenhoff]

That concludes our AMA with the Intel Optane Team. Thanks all for your participation.

If you happened to miss the Optane AMA, we'll have the Optane AMA Digest up on the site early next week.