Cache drives were important when we had mechanical HDD's, and SSD's were really expensive. I really don't see the point of a small cache SSD today. If you want speed, and I/O's, you can RAID a couple of SATA SSD's, or go for even better and RAID some NVME/PCIe M2 SSD's. As actual drives, they may be useful in some cases, but this, to me, is just too late to market.

Evildead666:

Cache drives were important when we had mechanical HDD's, and SSD's were really expensive. I really don't see the point of a small cache SSD today. If you want speed, and I/O's, you can RAID a couple of SATA SSD's, or go for even better and RAID some NVME/PCIe M2 SSD's. As actual drives, they may be useful in some cases, but this, to me, is just too late to market.

As cache drives I completely agree. The average consumer is not savvy enough to understand any of this and/or actually do the installation while the average enthusiast already has some crazy fast NVMe m.2 SSD for boot and apps in excess of 256 gigs. That being said, some people are doing this with the 900P u.2 and getting both speed and capacity that nothing on the market can currently touch: https://rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?97190-VROC-Bootable-Raid-with-Intel-900p-when-will-this-be-supported-in-the-BIOS TL;DR you can use an Asus hyper 16X + 4X m.2 -> u.2 adapters to get VROC RAID 0 on 4 900P U.2 drives with more than 1 TB of insanely fast, bootable storage. They also did this without a VROC key.

Evildead666:

I really don't see the point of a small cache SSD today. If you want speed, and I/O's, you can RAID a couple of SATA SSD's, or go for even better and RAID some NVME/PCIe M2 SSD's. As actual drives, they may be useful in some cases, but this, to me, is just too late to market.

I'm not sure if they're too late to the market, but it is still bad timing. HDDs are still more cost effective at 1TB+, and the cost savings get exponential as you get higher. RAID'ing SSDs is generally a bad idea unless you're on a real tight budget. All it does is improve sequential read/write speeds (which most applications will never take advantage of in a useful manner) while hurting random read/write speeds, which is where SSD performance really comes in handy.

schmidtbag:

I'm not sure if they're too late to the market, but it is still bad timing. HDDs are still more cost effective at 1TB+, and the cost savings get exponential as you get higher. RAID'ing SSDs is generally a bad idea unless you're on a real tight budget. All it does is improve sequential read/write speeds (which most applications will never take advantage of in a useful manner) while hurting random read/write speeds, which is where SSD performance really comes in handy.

Usually true about the RAID overhead/latencies but due to the way Optane works and the way VROC works the random read/writes (even in RAID) crush just about every NVMe drive. Check out the benchmarks on the 2nd page of the thread I posted. I just checked my 950 pro and 960 pro against the Optane RAID setup, these are the results: https://i.imgur.com/YH1XNow.jpg

Bare in mind each drive has minimal data on so they will read faster.

funny thing is that a drive like this seems that it will be really good with amd's fusion drive , optane memory is locked down to intel only ... fusion drives are they locked to amd? Or you can have one with intel cpus ? would be nice experiment to hook up a 16~64gb optane to 1tb ssd with fusion drive and see what results it yields