Samsung preps for Z-SSD smackdown on Intel Optane drives

Samsung is launching its ambitious supercharged NAND Z-SSD in competition with Intel's P4800X Optane drive. Specs for the SZ985 Z-NAND drive were revealed in November, displaying close-to-Optane performance, slightly lower latency, faster read/write bandwidth and random read but lower random write IOPS.   Tech Capacity R/ …

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting how the NAND memory writes total and Xpoint are so close, you'd think these things had been designed to eventually fail with NAND amazingly upping it's game and Xpoint nowhere near the initial super duper number of writes as first mooted. Over to you fellow cynics.

[Anonymous Coward]

... or that Xpoint technology failed. Since they had already committed to shipping it, they just created a top-end SLC module will similar specs and called it "Xpoint".

[A Non e-mouse]

@A/C

Next you'll be saying the moon landings are fake...

[kain preacher]

Re: @A/C

We have never been to the moon, But the pics are real. They taken in parallel universe given to us by aliens

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought the current Xpoint speed is limited by the existing CPU interfaces? While it is useful (i.e. shows better performance than the competitors) for heavy workloads, the full performance of Xpoint will be unlocked with newer, lower latency interfaces to CPU's.

Note that this ignores any advances from Xpoint's competitors that may make it look less impressive...

[chrismevans]

I expect they are similar because writes all hit DRAM on the cards. Then they're coalesced and written to NAND asynchronously. I'd be more concerned that Optane appears therefore to have no implicit hardware advantage over well managed NAND....

[Anonymous Coward]

>I expect they are similar because writes all hit DRAM on the cards. Then they're coalesced and written to NAND asynchronously.

Perhaps I should clarify, write endurance.

[Cuddles]

"slightly lower latency"

The table says latency is as much as 100% higher, which is rather more than "slightly" and the opposite of "lower".

[Steve Foster]

Re: "slightly lower latency"

I rather think they meant "slightly worse" (as in they were using lower/higher in the usual positive sense [ie higher = better], without considering that for latency, the logic is reversed), for wide-ranging values of "slightly".

[NoneSuch]

But...

Can it play Crysis?

[Nimby]

RAID

I'm totally picking up 4 of these to make a RAID10 array!

[Anonymous Coward]

I dont believe there is DRAM on the Optane SSD. Just on Samsung one