Aren't these SSD's intel's way of making M.2 SSD's with a "DRAM" cache? Since Intel doesn't make DRAM but they do make persistent memory Optane DRAM modules, this is their way of adding "DRAM" to an SSD for caching and improving performance. At least thats the way I see it.

Ive had a couple of these fail that then report as different capacity depending on the system (Mac, Win etc) it's plugged into to. I really don't get the point of it, just use a decent NVMe drive.

Stairmand:

Ive had a couple of these fail that then report as different capacity depending on the system (Mac, Win etc) it's plugged into to. I really don't get the point of it, just use a decent NVMe drive.

Like anything with Optane they have amazing 4KQ1T1 performance but there is a massive catch. These are not 2 in 1 devices that can stand alone. They require bifurcation and the Optane caching "magic" is facilitated by your CPU. If Intel were to make these 100% standalone units the onboard processor would make these drives prohibitively expensive and the capacities would still suck. There was a brief period of time where Optane caching made sense for power users but Intel never promoted that use case and then killed off its potential completely when they canceled the incoming M15/815P drives. There was a time when a huge SATA SSD cached to a 58GB 800P drive was both faster and less expensive than pure NVMe SSDs but Intel saw no value in that use case and never even officially supported it. The new PCIe gen 4 P5800X drives don't have a consumer counterpart so the prices are just insane. That is pretty much the end of power user Optane. Fun fact on just how terrible the support for Optane is. If you cache a HDD to Optane, Intel never bothered to work with Microsoft on a driver to pass through defragmentation. As a result Windows will attempt to "TRIM" your HDD because it cannot see the HDD under the Optane cache. The officially support guidance for this is to literally disable Optane, defragment your HDD and then reenable Optane.

Why is it called H2O? Surely it doesn't have liquid cooling as a requirement?

nosirrahx:

These are not 2 in 1 devices that can stand alone. They require bifurcation and the Optane caching "magic" is facilitated by your CPU. If Intel were to make these 100% standalone units the onboard processor would make these drives prohibitively expensive and the capacities would still suck.

Are you referring to the next gen or existing Optane drives? Also, what are you defining as "standalone"? My laptop came with a 16GB Optane (it was a free upgrade so I thought I might as well take it) and I currently use it to store my OS and applications. So, the drive is definitely standing-alone and works fine as such. I get around 3GB/s of read speed, so clearly I'm not lacking in performance on a mobile platform.

schmidtbag:

Are you referring to the next gen or existing Optane drives? Also, what are you defining as "standalone"? My laptop came with a 16GB Optane (it was a free upgrade so I thought I might as well take it) and I currently use it to store my OS and applications. So, the drive is definitely standing-alone and works fine as such. I get around 3GB/s of read speed, so clearly I'm not lacking in performance on a mobile platform.

I am talking specifically about 2 in 1 NAND + Optane drives. They present as 2 separate drives to an AMD system for example. I am also an Optane user and for very limited use cases the technology is great. I built 4 Vivobook Pro laptops with 800p + large SATA SSD configurations long before large NVMe SSDs were cheap. They have been fast and flawless for many years now. I also use 905p in my workstation.