CrystalDisk Info - Optane drive shows 96% after about 9 months.

PerpetualCycle · Apr 11, 2022

As I mentioned, the technology is 3D Xpoint and the Intel 3d D XPoint branding is "Optane".

3D XPoint technology has been around for years. Intel just decided to try and sell a QLC SSD, which are not that desirable,, as an Optane product by putting a small 3D Xpoint cache in it. Most SSD have a small faster cache, and with most QLC drives, it is a TLC cache (but they don't call it a TLC drive unless they are trying to dupe consumers, they usually don't specify what type of NAND).

BTW, 3D XPoint (Intel Optane brand) was developed jointly by Intel and Micron Memory. Micron manufactures the chips at their FAB. Micron has decided to leave the 3D XPoint businness, so it is unclear what is the future of Optane/3D Xpoint. It is probably dead. is my guess

hsehestedt · Apr 11, 2022

Pure Optane drives are rare, especially in the consumer space due to high cost compared to NAND technology drives. While NAND has a much lower endurance, it's more than good enough for the average consumer. However, because Optane has such a high endurance rating and high speed it becomes perfectly well suited in smaller capacities (32GB is a typical amount) as cache fronting either NAND or spinning platters.

With higher speed NVMe SSDs, the need for Optane becomes obsoleted which is why you typically only see it fronting SATA SSDs or spinning disks.

As for endurance, assume you have a drive with a 300 TBW rating on a 1 TB drive and a five year warranty. This allows for over 164 GB to be written each day in the warranty period. Most consumers won't consistently write that much data every single day. Put another way, that gives you a DWPD (Drive Writes Per Day) rating of about 0.164. Compare that to a higher end drive such as the Seagate Firecuda 520 and you get a vastly improved DWPD of 0.9863 - meaning that you could write just shy of the equivalent of the ENTIRE capacity of the drive every single day for the five years.

jimbo45 · Apr 11, 2022

hsehestedt said:
Pure Optane drives are rare, especially in the consumer space due to high cost compared to NAND technology drives. While NAND has a much lower endurance, it's more than good enough for the average consumer. However, because Optane has such a high endurance rating and high speed it becomes perfectly well suited in smaller capacities (32GB is a typical amount) as cache fronting either NAND or spinning platters.

With higher speed NVMe SSDs, the need for Optane becomes obsoleted which is why you typically only see it fronting SATA SSDs or spinning disks.

As for endurance, assume you have a drive with a 300 TBW rating on a 1 TB drive and a five year warranty. This allows for over 164 GB to be written each day in the warranty period. Most consumers won't consistently write that much data every single day. Put another way, that gives you a DWPD (Drive Writes Per Day) rating of about 0.164. Compare that to a higher end drive such as the Seagate Firecuda 520 and you get a vastly improved DWPD of 0.9863 - meaning that you could write just shy of the equivalent of the ENTIRE capacity of the drive every single day for the five years.

So in Plain English what does that mean for the typical consumer. Probably IMO that the entire computer would have been consigned to the local tip years before the device is likely to have failed. (I stll prefer old School MTBF stats!!).

While currently the planet needs a load more Engineers rather than Bankers or Economists -- blinding people "with science" doesn't add to the merits of the "case for the prosecution",

Cheers
jimbo

cereberus · Apr 11, 2022

hsehestedt said:
Pure Optane drives are rare, especially in the consumer space due to high cost compared to NAND technology drives. While NAND has a much lower endurance, it's more than good enough for the average consumer. However, because Optane has such a high endurance rating and high speed it becomes perfectly well suited in smaller capacities (32GB is a typical amount) as cache fronting either NAND or spinning platters.

With higher speed NVMe SSDs, the need for Optane becomes obsoleted which is why you typically only see it fronting SATA SSDs or spinning disks.

As for endurance, assume you have a drive with a 300 TBW rating on a 1 TB drive and a five year warranty. This allows for over 164 GB to be written each day in the warranty period. Most consumers won't consistently write that much data every single day. Put another way, that gives you a DWPD (Drive Writes Per Day) rating of about 0.164. Compare that to a higher end drive such as the Seagate Firecuda 520 and you get a vastly improved DWPD of 0.9863 - meaning that you could write just shy of the equivalent of the ENTIRE capacity of the drive every single day for the five years.

I think these warranty periods are a bit like new car warranties (typically 3 years or 36000 miles whichever comes first). Nobody seriously thinks a modern car will crap out immediately the warranty ends (sods law of course it has happened to me lol).

I find it sad that some vendors deliberately hide the real figures to avoid getting sued.

PerpetualCycle · Apr 11, 2022

hsehestedt said:
hsehestedt said:

I stand corrected. I looked it up and the TBW rating is in fact only 300 for that drive. That's interesting because that disagrees with the values reported by SMART. I wonder if that is a marketing to limit the warranty but that the drive is actually more durable than what they advertise.

Click to expand...

The values reported in SMART are based on the number of actual erase cycles on the QLC NAND, not the TBW.

PerpetualCycle · Apr 11, 2022

hsehestedt said:
Pure Optane drives are rare, especially in the consumer space due to high cost compared to NAND technology drives. While NAND has a much lower endurance, it's more than good enough for the average consumer. However, because Optane has such a high endurance rating and high speed it becomes perfectly well suited in smaller capacities (32GB is a typical amount) as cache fronting either NAND or spinning platters.

With higher speed NVMe SSDs, the need for Optane becomes obsoleted which is why you typically only see it fronting SATA SSDs or spinning disks.

As for endurance, assume you have a drive with a 300 TBW rating on a 1 TB drive and a five year warranty. This allows for over 164 GB to be written each day in the warranty period. Most consumers won't consistently write that much data every single day. Put another way, that gives you a DWPD (Drive Writes Per Day) rating of about 0.164. Compare that to a higher end drive such as the Seagate Firecuda 520 and you get a vastly improved DWPD of 0.9863 - meaning that you could write just shy of the equivalent of the ENTIRE capacity of the drive every single day for the five years.

3D XPoint has a bigger advantage in latency (and iops) and endurance over SSD rather than speed, so it is not obsoleted performance-wise. It will be obsoleted because of the cost, the market size and the fact that Micron will no longer produce the chips.

3d XPoint latency is on the order of a few microseconds. Data center Optane drives do on the order of 1.5 million iops on reads compared to a couple hundred thousand on data center SSD. Very suitable for high-performance database applications but very expensive. Because of this they also provide for a very good cache for client class nvme SSD, but that is not a very big market, just incidental. It is wasted as a cache for a QLC nvme SSD drive though IMO.

I should have caught that this was just a small 3D XPoint cache on a nvme SSD - I didn't pick ups on the size of the drive, I thought it was much smaller than a TB. A TB of 3d XPoint is very expensive. A 1.6 TB PCIE 4.0 Optane is around $3.5k

CrystalDisk Info - Optane drive shows 96% after about 9 months.

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