Dual carriageway to autobahn: Intel revs up Optane caching memory by doubling PCIe lanes

Intel has added two more PCIe lanes to speed up its Optane memory disk drive caching device and tweaked power handling for a lower deep-sleep power draw. Back in January 2017, Intel released 16 and 32GB Optane Memory products in an M.2 card format, which were meant to cache disk drives using its Rapid Storage Technology (RST …

[Anonymous Coward]

So....

Good old Intel, appealing to the performance storage market by releasing an overpriced premium product a year after your competition has released something twice as fast. Still, hard to do more with so few available PCIe lanes though...

What’s that? I can get 8 PCIe 4.x lanes and there are 5GBps SSDs on The new Ryzen CPUs? And it’s cheaper to get two of those SSDs than equivalent Optane parts? Hmmm....I wonder which will prove most popular.

One more question Intel? Is this available across your latest product range, “7th gen or greater CPUs excluding ...” or is it another Crimson Canyon - advertised but not really available... The previous “math” for determining Intel storage options has been interesting where you had one CPU PCIe 4x lane that if used disabled other PCIe lanes.

[Kobblestown]

Optane is a great technology at the right price and for the right purpose. I use 6 Optane drives (4*16 + 2*32 ) as SLOG and L2ARC devices for a ZFS RAID-Z array with 8 disks. I got them at a good price and they work great. Although I don't consider them useful for anything else.