consumer. ive been looking at maybe picking up one of the newer 4x4 optane ssds but they started out at like $1,000 for the smallest (400gb), sold out like instantly and are now at $1,500 and still sold out
I believe this is not due to demand but due to very limited production capacity. Intel makes Optane only in a single fab so the output can't be that high and has to be split between all Optane branded products.
Optane is a good preview of how Arc is going to end up.
Well thankfully Intel had the common sense to open up Arc to AIB's to produce too. If they had done the same for Optane then we would not have this bad news now.
Interesting, I even exchanged my optane for a new one thinking it was defective but I had the same problem.
Might be Optane specific problem. That is why most people who even have secondary PF's on other drives (also a minority) might have not noticed this. But i do wonder when did you buy your Optane that it was cheaper than RAM?
Because mostly RAM is significantly cheaper to add. And much easier to source unlike Optane that seems Unobtanium most of the time.
There were high RAM prices a few years back. If you bought Optane then, then i would understand it being cheaper.
Optane's highly restrictive use cases made it effectively a solution in search of a problem. Maybe they should license it to SSD makers to make a kind of hybrid drive, 2TB NVME SSD with 128GB Optane cache might actually make more sense than what Intel has tried doing with it.
They tried to make Hybrids. H10 or what it was called. Did not take off. I agree that they should licence it out.
It is a shame in my opinion. Optane seems like a great replacement for NAND based SSDs as it improved access speed/ responsiveness, and not just focusing on fluffy sequential speed improvement which don't benefit most consumers. There are problems with it, but I am not sure if Intel and Micron actually tried to improve the weaknesses of the product. Tying use of Optane to specific Intel based system did not help either.
I especially like the fact that unlike NAND that needs parrallelism to perform best Optane does not care. 100GB is as fast as 1.6TB. Where as with NAND 100GB would be dog slow.
Also much better 4K r/w than NAND. Couple that with insane durability and it's pretty great. Except Intel never licened it out. Produces low volume and thus prices remain high and market penetration remains low.
