Intel's Optane super fast storage device offers a thousand times the switching speed of an SSD.
Intel's Optane Storage
According to PCWorld, the Optane super fast storage systems will work with Intel's newly announced Kaby Lake CPUs and the Z270 chipset. Intel shared a couple of pictures of its highly anticipated Optane non-volatile memory drives a day before CES officially kicked off. However, the high-tech manufacturer company did not release with the photos capacity, availability and pricing of the Optane drives.
The only available information for now is that the initial Optane drives will be 16GB and 32GB in size. In order to cache hard drive performance, they'll be used with Intel's Rapid Storage Technology. At the moment, SSDs are already being used to cache hard drives with RST, so it remains to be seen how much of a difference it'll make if instead of today's SSDs will be used Optane drives.
At the moment, the capacity of the Optane drives is certainly far lower than the capacity that is expected to eventually be reached. Since the introduction of the Optane technology Intel has said that it would eventually approach system RAM in performance and offer capacity exceeding today's SSDs.
The initial Optane drives will use a 3D memory technology codeveloped with Micron. It is expected that future Optane drive iterations could even go into DDR4 memory slots, and become, therefore, a product ready for consumer use. Intel's super-fast Optane will eventually replace today's SSDs and DRAM.
With the upcoming Optane storage devices from Intel PC booting, game play and productivity applications will become much faster. Octane will become a totally new class of memory and storage.
When Will Optane Ship?
According to Computerworld, the low-capacity Optane storage are expected to ship in the second quarter of this year, but it could take a while before large-capacity Optane SSDs are made available. Before coming to PCs, the large-capacity Optane SSDs will likely be installed in servers. IBM and Facebook are among the tech companies that are already testing large-capacity SSDs in their servers.
Optane won't be cheap, of course, like any new storage technology. This new Intel technology is being produced in a factory in Dalian, China, in limited quantities. It is expected that over time production will increase, reducing the cost of making Optane drives. When prices will start dropping, Intel is projecting a quick switch to mass production.
Where Will Optane Be Used?
This week at CES were announced many PCs that will have the 16GB or 32GB Optane storage installed. Initially, the storage drives will fit into sockets on motherboards. Ultimately, users will be able to install large-capacity Optane storage drives into m.2 or 2.5-inch slots.
With a price starting at $909, Lenovo's ThinkPad T570 was the first laptop announced to come with an optional Optane storage drive. However, the laptop's price will go up if you select the 16GB Optane PCIe M.2 2242-S3 storage option.
During the spring update to the product, HP's revamped Envy Curved All-in-One 34 with Kaby Lake will also get Optane storage drives. Dell announced its plans to install Optane in some of its OptiPlex desktops and Precision laptops around June. Supermicro also announced support for Optane in its new SuperO motherboards for business and gaming PCs.
