Intel

Intel

Intel

Intel is positioning its new Optane technology as the next big advancement in computer storage after SSDs, and today it's announcing the first consumer product based on the technology. The "Intel Optane Memory" drives are 16GB and 32GB M.2 sticks that can be paired with a larger SSD or HDD to speed up total system performance. Intel's Rapid Storage Technology allows your PC to see the two drives as one storage volume, and the software automatically caches important data to the faster drive.

The Optane Memory drives will be available to order on April 24th. A 16GB drive costs $44 while a 32GB drive costs $77.

To use the drives, your PC will need to be "Intel Optane memory ready," which at a bare minimum requires a 7th-generation Kaby Lake CPU, a new 200-series chipset, and a compatible B-M keyed M.2 2280 slot with either two or four PCI Express data lanes. The full requirements are laid out on this page, and your motherboard manufacturer's site should also be able to tell you more.

If the Rapid Storage Technology caching setup sounds familiar to you, it's because Intel pushed it a few years ago as a way to ease the transition from large, cheap, and slow hard drives to small, expensive, and fast SSDs. As Optane matures, we may get to the point where it's possible to buy a drive that's large enough to use as your system's primary storage without paying more than you did for your computer (the 375GB server version of Optane currently costs a whopping $1,520), but for now the Optane Memory drives deliver some of the benefits of the technology without requiring too much extra cash.

The server version of Optane, the 375GB Optane SSD DV P4800X, has a bunch of different potential applications, including the ability to be used as extra RAM; it isn't as fast as standard memory, but it takes up a lot less space and it's significantly cheaper. You could do that on these consumer Optane Memory drives in a roundabout way by using them for your computer's swap fie, but for now Intel is pushing them primarily as cache.

We've written about Optane and its 3D XPoint memory a few times at this point, but the main thing you need to know is that Intel says it's faster than current SSDs and denser (albeit still slower) than DRAM. It's also designed to maintain better performance under load. Optane is intended to be much more durable than today's NAND flash SSDs, since write operations don't physically wear down the memory. Eventually, Intel will also sell Optane DIMMs designed to dramatically boost memory capacity in exchange for some speed; in time, the dividing line between fast-but-volatile DRAM and slower-but-non-volatile forms of storage like HDDs and SSDs could be eliminated entirely.

Listing image by Intel